


The Department of Underdogs and Lost Causes

by what_alchemy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Activism, Adulthood, Anal Play, Anal Sex, Bigotry & Prejudice, Break Up, Edinburgh, F/M, First Time, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Ministry of Magic (Harry Potter), Minor Draco Malfoy/Ron Weasley, Minor Luna Lovegood/Harry Potter, Muggle Culture, Muggle Life, Orphanage, Pureblood Politics (Harry Potter), Reunions, Rimming, Squibs, Vaginal Sex, author is in denial about the closing of a certain business over 10 years ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 16:33:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17389826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: Searching for a way out of her dead-end Ministry job, Hermione finds Severus Snape instead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fandomlucky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomlucky/gifts).



When Hermione Granger, Order of Merlin, First Class, first began to venture into the bustling streets of any given city with a gaggle of children barely out of their nappies, she pooh-poohed the idea of leashing them. “They’re not dogs!” she’d cried so righteously, ready to make badges publicising the coming liberation of children everywhere. 

And then she learned that, indeed, they were not dogs. Dogs had more sense.

It had been a long time since she was that young.

“Has everyone got hold of the rainbow rope?” she asked of the neat line of children ages seven to ten before her. Everyone nodded, and sure enough, a quick inspection revealed eight little hands grasping the rope in question and eight little wrists secured to the rope by eight coloured ribbons. “Very good,” she said. “And is everyone’s buddy in attendance?” Everyone rechecked and murmured and turned their big eyes back on her and nodded again. “Excellent. And is everyone ready to behave for one last stop before we have our sweeties?”

A cacophony of cheers.

“Very well, chaps! Onward to the apothecary!” 

Hermione had been eyeing it for months. A curious little shop in Old Town Edinburgh literally called The Apothecary; sleepy, with strange odds and ends in the window, the knick-knacks of a time gone by, as if bequeathed by an 18th century sawbones of a doctor. On the outside, it would not appear out of place in Diagon Alley, but a peek inside revealed a normal Muggle druggist’s, not overburdened by customers, and this made it perfect for her outing.

She marched her ducklings to the shop and they plastered their little faces to the window and shouted their appreciation.

“Look!” said Henry. “A snidget in a cage! And it’s _dead! _”__

__“Henry!” Hermione said. “What did we talk about?”_ _

__Henry subsided from the window, his shoulders rolling inward as he turned those big brown eyes on her._ _

__“No home-words,” he said._ _

__“What shall we call it instead?”_ _

__“Erm.”_ _

__“A budgie, darling. It’s a budgie. And does anyone know the process a formerly living animal might be subject to in order to be kept in such a manner?”_ _

__“Taxidermy!” Harry W. shrieked, and Hermione suppressed a sigh._ _

__“Yes, Harry,” she said. “But what is the proper way to answer?”_ _

__Ermengarde, Hermione D., Albie, Verona, and Hermione L. all raised their hands. Hermione winked at them and said, “Very good, chaps. Shall we?”_ _

__Another vigorous round of nodding and they were in, the door tinkling as Hermione opened it. With an admonition to stay with their buddies and be extra careful and quiet, the children were loosed into the shop. They all went to the magazine section and huddled around something illustrated Hermione couldn’t see from her vantage. She would take them to the first aid section after she spoke to the proprietor._ _

__Hermione made her way to the chemist’s counter in the back. There were no employees to be seen the last few times she’d poked her head in, and she wanted to explain herself before getting started. She schooled her expression into one of bland pleasantness and squared her shoulders. A school trip, she usually said, to learn about local businesses, and of course each child will buy something today to thank you for your forbearance. But the words dried up when she saw the man who emerged from the back._ _

__Tall and gangly with skin the colour of porcelain and a nose that looked, to Hermione’s adult eye, less oversized and more _repeatedly broken_ , Severus Snape was unmistakable, no matter that he was meant to be almost twenty years dead. Though his hair had been cut much shorter than he wore it at Hogwarts, it still fell about his eyes and ears and seemed, if anything, an anti-style of no particular fashion whatsoever. The years had shot it through with silver. It suited him._ _

__There was, of course, a great scar that erupted from beneath the collar of his black button-down and curled ragged around his neck and shoulder._ _

__“May I help you?” he asked. His voice was more gravelly than it had ever been, but the sneer was just the same. Hermione was aware that she was gaping at him but she couldn’t stop, and she saw, she _felt_ as if by the echo of memory, the way he was gearing up to denounce her entire party as dunderheads and order them out of his shop. “Madam, what is the meaning of—”_ _

__He froze, eyes widening as they caught on her face for the first time. _Curious,_ Hermione thought hysterically. _They’re brown, not black. A very deep brown.__ _

__“I do apologise, sir,” she said. “We’re…” She wished she had some water for her parched throat. Juice. Whiskey. “…on a trip.”_ _

__One black brow hiked eloquently over an eye._ _

__“And are all these ruffians yours, madam?” There, in the corner of his mouth, a barely contained smirk._ _

__She tipped her chin up and drew a deep breath. “They certainly are,” she said. “As I was saying, we are learning about small businesses at school and—”_ _

__“And why should this be your classroom?” Snape said. “Is this how you go about your business, madam? Riding roughshod over the small business owners of Britain like a bulldozer?”_ _

__Hermione scowled but squared her shoulders. “—it dovetails nicely with our first aid unit and I thought it might not trouble you overmuch to have some schoolchildren come in and be taught to recognise basic first aid products as they might find at any chemist’s…”_ _

__“I suppose this is some pathetic attempt to get them while they’re young,” Snape hissed, voice dropped suddenly low, “nip any potential prejudices in the bud. Teach them about Muggles and they won’t be so ready to hate them, is that it? How facile. Purebloods, are they? Sometimes the rot comes from the core of the wand, Weasley, make no mistake.”_ _

__“No home-words!” piped a voice from below the counter. Hermione glanced down to find the riotous blond curls of Severus K. at her elbow. She patted him on the back._ _

__“Hush, Severus,” Hermione said, and she heard Snape choking on nothing. “Go look at the magazines for just a moment.” He eyed Snape with a tiny scowl as if sizing him up and finding him wanting. Snape, for his part, stared at the boy with open horror. “Go on,” Hermione said, and Severus K. dragged himself back to the group with one last hateful glance back at Snape._ _

__“I’ll have to obliviate you,” Snape said. “And then maybe myself.”_ _

__“It’s become a rather popular name, I’m afraid,” she said. “We have four of them at St. Hieronymus’ alone, second only to our eight Harrys.”_ _

__“I am uninterested in the ramblings of a schoolmarm!” Snape drew himself to his full height and clenched his fists at his sides. “Give me forty-eight hours,” he said, “before you alert the authorities.”_ _

__“I’m neither a Weasley nor a schoolmarm, and no one is calling the authorities, for God’s sake.” Hermione pushed her hair away from her face. “Calm down and _think_.” _Had he he always this easily addled?__ _

__He blinked at her as if coming back to himself._ _

__“St. Hieronymus’,” he said faintly._ _

__“Indeed,” Hermione said._ _

__“They’re—”_ _

__“No home-words,” Hermione said with raised brows._ _

__Snape pressed his lips together._ _

__“They’re…admirers of Mrs. Norris.”_ _

__A laugh clapped out of Hermione’s gut unbidden. Even Snape looked surprised._ _

__“Oh, I like that,” Hermione said. “Much better than anything else we’ve come up with.”_ _

__“Why come up with anything when there’s already a perfectly good word?”_ _

__“Because,” Hermione said, and leaned in to whisper. “The ‘perfectly good word’ as you call it was most often used as an insult and a punishment in the homes they’ve come from and is therefore undesirable, and ‘non-magical’ defines them in relation to magic which in turn places having magic as the default and _not_ having it as marginal.” She stepped back. “It’s time for a new term, but we’ve not had much luck finding one.”_ _

__“And I don’t suppose you’ve ever considered asking them instead of taking it upon yourself to speak for and define them yourself.”_ _

__“Well I—”_ _

__“Typical, Miss Granger. Good day. I trust you can see yourself and the little admirers out.”_ _

__There were no robes to sweep him so grandly away, but he managed to convey the sentiment regardless._ _

__

__There was no getting around it: S.O.P. needed its own educational facility, preferably in a major population centre like Muggle London. Hermione had turned the problem over and over, but there was nothing for it. The squibs from St. Hieronymus’ could no longer rely on bi-monthly “school trips” and questionably helpful books to acquire their practical non-magical skills, and the squibs _not_ from St. Hieronymus’ needed a space to practice without the possibility of saying an embargoed word in front of an unsuspecting Muggle._ _

__It was not merely the Snape incident. It was everything Hermione had worked for going to pot because the students’ skills were not being affirmed and reaffirmed often enough to be effective. In addition to early and frequent access to computer labs, by the time they were teenagers they needed their own laptops as well as mobile phones, and that simply wouldn’t do when they lived in a place saturated by magic. It was an impossible problem; St. Hieronymus’ was run by wizarding authorities and, though Hermione had finally chipped away at them enough to make being magic-free a requirement for working there, there was no budging them to move somewhere that wasn’t so ensconced in magic as to be alienating, not to mention incompatible with modern Muggle technology. And the M.O.P. and S.O.P. budget didn’t have enough room in the budget for a separate educational facility open to all Admirers of Mrs. Norris and complete with teachers of all manner of germane Muggle subject._ _

__Hermione was of the opinion that M.O.P and S.O.P. should be separate programs in the Department for Social Welfare altogether, should never have been bundled together in the first place, but she could say it ’til she was blue in the face and nothing would come of it. She was pulling her hair out trying to bend the budget into a far bigger one when there came a knock at the door._ _

__“Woo-ooo,” Phaedra Withersby called. Hermione suppressed the urge to sigh and swung her chair around to face the head of the Department of Social Welfare. She was dressed in purple ruffles today and leaned in the doorjamb, pretending at casual. “Hello, Hermione, dear,” she said._ _

__“Madam Withersby.”_ _

__“Honestly, Hermione, when are you going to call me Phaedra?”_ _

__“When you let me separate the Muggleborn Outreach Program from the Squib Outreach Program,” Hermione said, and, predictably, Madam Withersby laughed._ _

__“You’re so _funny_ , Hermione,” she said. “Now, were you able to make it to Belfast yesterday?”_ _

__Hermione felt her face draw into a scowl._ _

__“I’ve told you multiple times, madam, that I can’t do Muggleborn outreach when I am taking students from St. Hieronymus’ out for their practicums. These are two separate jobs.”_ _

__“They most certainly are not, Miss Granger,” Madam Withersby said, standing up straight and tall in the jamb. “MOP’n’SOP is a single entity—”_ _

__“Besides, how exactly would it work?” Hermione turned fully towards her in her chair and spread out her hands. “I was the only custodian for the day of eight nonmagical children from North Berwick to Edinburgh, and what did you think I should do? Side-along them one-by-one? Floo them? Take a portkey? All against S.O.P. measures laid out to teach them how to be self-sufficient without magic, and then what? I and eight, _eight_ children appear at the door of these Muggles, who are no doubt at their wits’ end about the accidental magic suddenly besieging their home and their child, and in front of these eight non-magical, motherless, fatherless children, I must tell this Muggle family, ‘Congratulations! Your child is a witch! Let me tell you all about the glories of the wizarding world and here’s a pamphlet for all the programming I’ve developed to integrate them into our society before you send them off to a school you can’t fathom, rarely to be seen again!’ Is that what you wanted me to do, Madam Withersby? Because if that sounds just smashing, maybe it should be your job!”_ _

__“Miss Granger!” Madam Withersby said, hand splayed against her bosom. “Contain yourself!”_ _

__“M.O.P and S.O.P. has only twenty employees, Madam Withersby,” Hermione said. “Which, I might add, is woefully inadequate, especially in comparison to other programs in the department. Magical Creature Welfare alone has one hundred and seventeen.”_ _

__“The MCW houses programs for werewolves, house elves, goblins, vampires, sidhe, Veela, and gnomes, among others, which, Miss Granger, MOP’n’SOP do not! Human children, that’s all you have to deal with!”_ _

__“Regardless, surely Mr. Omwe’ke or Ms. Lorcan could have gone to Belfast for you yesterday.”_ _

__“They are merely your assistants and thus not qualified—”_ _

__“They are highly trained DOSW professionals, Muggleborns themselves, and certainly up to the task, Madam Withersby.”_ _

__“Very well! If they’re so qualified, they can do your job for a month!”_ _

__Hermione gaped and shot to her feet._ _

__“Madam Withersby—”_ _

__Madam Withersby held up a quelling hand._ _

__“You, Miss Granger, are clearly in desperate need of a holiday. You will take it, and we will see about your future with MOP’n’SOP after you come back with a formal apology.”_ _

__“My programming—”_ _

__“ _Our_ programming, Miss Granger!” Withersby had gone shrill enough to scrape at Hermione’s eardrums. “I can see you’ve become too invested—”_ _

__“ _Too invested!_ ”_ _

__“—and are thus overemotional about the direction of—”_ _

__“I _created_ Muggleborn Outreach!” Hermione said, raising her voice. “I _created_ Squib Outreach! And with them, I created this whole department and your bloody job! I am the director of both programs and _should have a damn say in their direction!_ ”_ _

__Madam Withersby regarded her as if with great pity._ _

__“Go home, Miss Granger. Relax. Think about your future.”_ _

__

__Hermione stopped off in North Berwick to tell Ephigenia Hillcut, matron, and the charges of St. Hieronymus’ Home for Wayward Squibs that she would be on holiday for the next month. Some of the littler ones cried, and Henry asked if it was because he’d used home-words where Muggles could hear. She assured him it was nothing to do with that. One of the teenagers, a Harry, stared at her with narrowed eyes and said, “You never go on holiday.” Hermione had no answer but a weak smile that no doubt reassured the lot of them, and she took her leave._ _

__And landed promptly in Harry Potter’s living room, where she pitched herself face first into the sofa._ _

__“Hello to you too, Hermione,” Harry said from the recliner._ _

__“I’m being sacked,” she moaned._ _

__“Now that can’t be true.”_ _

__“I mouthed off to Withersby, but I couldn’t help it! She’s just so damned infuriating.”_ _

__“Kingsley would never allow it,” Harry said. “You should be the head of the department anyway.”_ _

__“Ugh, I wouldn’t want it.” Hermione sat up and looked at him for the first time. He was warming his hands on a cuppa, legs drawn up like a pretzel in his chair. A medical book sat open on the armrest. “Would that M.O.P. and S.O.P. were their own department, and I were head of that. It’s what I was trying to do in the first place, and then everything went tits up.”_ _

__“The Ministry was never going to add another department and another floor, love. It had to be absorbed and rejiggered.”_ _

__“Ugh, the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures should never have existed, I mean what kind of second-class citizen rubbish—”_ _

__“All right, Hermione,” Harry said hastily. “What is the task at hand, immediately?”_ _

__“I’m not apologising to her!”_ _

__Harry laughed and closed his book. He unfolded his legs and leaned forward, elbows on knees._ _

__“No, I don’t suppose you would.”_ _

__“A month’s administrative leave. Paid.”_ _

__“Oh, that’s not so bad. You should go to Ibiza. Or Lisbon. Oh! Or Mykonos.”_ _

__“Harry.” Hermione’s fists planted themselves on her hips quite without her say-so. “I’m not going anywhere. I have to spend this ‘holiday’ figuring out how to wrest M.O.P. and S.O.P. from Withersby’s grasp.”_ _

__“Privatisation?” Harry asked. “I’m not sure how possible that is.”_ _

__“She doesn’t even care about either program, did you know?”_ _

__“Yes, I did, from all the times you’ve told me in great detail.”_ _

__“Oh, Harry, I’m sorry! What a boor I am.” She scooted over to the end of the couch and patted his hand. “How are you? How is St. Mungo’s?” She carefully didn’t mention Luna, whose absence filled the walls of the cottage._ _

__“The same, and the same,” he said. “Honestly, Hermione. I’m very well. Very happy. I should have been a Healer from the start. A wise witch once told me it’s never too late to start being who you wanted to be.” Now he raised his eyebrows at her and blinked meaningfully._ _

__“Oh, don’t turn my words back on me, Harry,” she said. “I am quite happy myself, you know. I’m doing exactly what I wish to be doing.”_ _

__“I didn’t realise it was your dream to run underfunded social welfare programs by doing the jobs of thirty people on your own.”_ _

__“It was my dream to create resources and support systems for the most marginalised groups in the wizarding world, and I’m doing that, as imperfect as it may be,” Hermione said. “Did you know squib suicides are down by 70% from fifteen years ago? And Hogwarts is _finally_ allowing the parents and families of Muggleborns onto its grounds for emergencies and graduations? And rates of moderate to severe depression and anxiety across both populations is falling more every year?”_ _

__Harry encircled her wrist and rubbed his thumb gently into the delicate skin there._ _

__“Peace, Hermione,” he said. “I meant only that perhaps you could let yourself off the hook once in a while. The wizarding world is too heavy to carry on one person’s shoulders. Believe me, I know.” Harry pushed his glasses up his nose with a rueful smile._ _

__“Oh, dear.” Hermione sighed. “There I go again. I’m sorry. I know I should relax, but I find it nearly impossible.”_ _

__“No one said achieving our goals would be easy, love, but I don’t think anyone meant it should be this hard.”_ _

__“Privatisation is the only way I see forward,” Hermione said. “I would need grants and a foundation and donors, maybe a board of trustees. It’s all too much to think about right now but, by Merlin, if I could pull it off it would be greater than anything I could accomplish in the Ministry.”_ _

__“Take your holiday, Hermione,” Harry said. “A proper one. Anywhere in the world, somewhere you’ve always wanted to go. Promise me you’ll put this away for one week, and then you can come back and chew on it to your bulldog heart’s content.”_ _

__“I can’t tell if I’ve been insulted or complimented.”_ _

__“One week, Hermione.”_ _

__“Come with me?”_ _

__Harry held up his book. _Paediatric Spell Damage, 4th edition.__ _

__“Duty calls, love,” he said._ _

__“ _I_ have duties,” Hermione said. “To the Admirers of Mrs. Norris.”_ _

__Harry cocked his head, smiling even as he furrowed his brow._ _

__“That’s one thing to call them,” he said. “Where did you come up with that?”_ _

__“I just want to be of use, Harry,” she said. “I just…want everybody to be all right.”_ _

__Harry patted her arm. “I know,” he said. “Now get out of here. Have a drink. Get bloody laid.”_ _

__“Har har.”_ _

__He winked at her as she stepped into the fire._ _

__

__Hermione meant to ensconce herself on a beach in Bali, truly, but the next day came and found her once again in Edinburgh, before a dusty shop without any customers in it._ _

__Snape greeted her with a curled lip and a raised chin that said nothing less than _with your shield or on it, man.__ _

__“I thought you’d have scarpered by now,” Hermione said._ _

__“More fool me, taking you at your word.”_ _

__“It occurred to me,” Hermione said, “that you have no idea what your reputation is anymore. I thought I should tell you, in case it changed things.”_ _

__“I know what people think of me, Miss Granger. What you fail to grasp is that I simply do not care.”_ _

__“Order of Merlin, First Class,” Hermione said, and Snape’s jaw snapped shut. “Awarded posthumously, of course. Your birthday is a bank holiday along with Harry’s, and the poor Headmaster’s. There’s even a statue of you in Hogsmeade, and a rather odd group of witches and wizards leave love letters at it every day.”_ _

__It didn’t seem possible for him to grow paler, but he managed it anyway, and did she imagine it or did he sway a bit behind the counter?_ _

__“So you see, Professor, that no one could possibly come to throw you into prison. They wouldn’t even think it. Harry mounted such a campaign for the rehabilitation of your reputation right after the war, and you’re quite the tragic figure. People do love high romance. You could come home. If you wanted.”_ _

__“I have never wanted something less, Miss Granger,” he said, but it lacked the bite she was accustomed to._ _

__“Only, I thought, if you knew who you were to us—”_ _

__“I am exactly who I wish to be!” The pallor gave way to a blossoming red._ _

__“A Muggle chemist with no customers?”_ _

__“My God, you really are insufferable.” Snape huffed. “Why did you come here?”_ _

__“I told you, so you would know—”_ _

__“Why did you _really_ come here? And remember I know when you’re lying.”_ _

__Hermione fell silent. He was in charcoal trousers today, and yet another black button-down. She imagined he had several identical shirts and varied them exactly never, just like his ubiquitous wardrobe of black robes in school. Really, if he were trying to hide, he was doing a piss poor job of it and it was only a matter of time before a witch or wizard wandered into this shop anyway. He was lucky it was her and not someone eager to run to the _Prophet_ with the information. _ _

__“I’m being sacked,” she blurted._ _

__“You? Sacked? Shocking.”_ _

__“I’ll have you know I am a bloody star at my job.”_ _

__“But let me guess: you rub people the wrong way. You’ve no concept of how to be subtle and find the back roads into getting your way. An overbearing know-it-all and a Gryffindor; a winning combination the wizarding world will never survive, I’m sure.”_ _

__“That’s rich coming from a man who wouldn’t know a polite word if it bit him on the arse!”_ _

__“I do not care that you and your sparkling personality are about to be out of a job, Miss Granger,” Snape said. “And, as I do not hire unbearable swots, I cannot imagine what any of it has to do with me. I bid you good day and hope you never darken my door again.”_ _

__“I’m asking how you did it, you overgrown bat!”_ _

__Snape paused._ _

__“You think I owe you something, is that it? Whatever for, you foolish girl?”_ _

__“I don’t think that,” Hermione said. “I’ve never thought that. It’s just…I’ve dedicated my adult life to a cause that’s about to be taken away from me by someone who doesn’t care one whit about the populations my office serves. I want to be able to continue that work, and I need to be able to do it here, among Muggles. You have done so. I wish only to know how. I’m prepared to compensate you for any time you spend aiding me.”_ _

__“You take the little squibbies on excursions to the Muggle world. That will hardly fall apart without you, Miss Granger.”_ _

__“And the social workers I’ve installed in St. Hieronymus’?” Hermione asked, voice rising. “To treat the traumas of childhoods spent being abused and neglected by their families before finally being abandoned like yesterday’s rubbish? I suppose they’re useless too, don’t need them, nor the case managers who do the same for adults who had neither family nor St. Hieronymus’. How about the Wizarding/Muggle adoption liaison, who helps place our little Admirers into loving Muggle homes, I suppose she’s unnecessary too? And what about the witches and wizards and squibs who do all the Muggle skills training, particularly in computing, and Muggle employment coaching? They’re worn thin what with being short-staffed, so we might as well get rid of them, why not? Or the legal team fighting every day to scrub the books of outdated, offensive laws that declare squibs the non-sentient _property_ of their parents? Honestly, why not let squibs wallow in abuse and poverty like we used to, they’re better off killing themselves anyway!” Hermione was panting by the time she was finished, and Snape was staring at her dispassionately. She leaned against the counter, shoulders slumped, quite exhausted. “And that’s just the Squib Outreach Program,” she said. _ _

__“There’s more?” Snape asked. Hermione nodded, ignoring the arch in his tone._ _

__“I also run the Muggleborn Outreach Program.”_ _

__“Dear God, not—”_ _

__“Yes,” Hermione said. “MOP’n’SOP, they call it. And me. We’re all a bit of a joke around the Ministry, but it’s important work we do, Professor. I can’t…I can’t let people get to me, and if they won’t listen when I’m a woman then I will be a bulldozer, as you say. I’m not ashamed of that.”_ _

__Snape looked at the clock mounted on the wall to his right. He stared at it far longer than anyone would need to in order to glean the time. Then, he swept out from behind the counter, strode to the front door, locked it, and flipped his open sign to closed._ _

__“Come with me, Miss Granger,” he said. “I’ll not have this conversation on an empty stomach.”_ _

__

__Snape lived above The Apothecary in a small flat he kept neat and bare but for the walls (and floors) lined with an endless array of books and records. The faintest magic hummed throughout the space. Hermione was surprised to find it equipped exactly like a Muggle home despite the traces of magic: electricity, internet modem, appliances, telly and even a proper sound system. Hermione tried to imagine it: the great bat of the dungeons and a marked Death Eater, surfing the internet and listening to, well, whatever it was middle aged Muggles listened to. Fleetwood Mac?_ _

__“Do you have a mobile?” she asked as he plunked before her a plate of fish and chips from the chippie down the street._ _

__“Do you?” he said. Somehow he managed to imbue his contempt for her into the way he soaked his chips with vinegar._ _

__“Yes,” she said._ _

__“Amazing.”_ _

__“Do you listen to Fleetwood Mac?”_ _

__“Miss Granger, do shut up.”_ _

__Hermione shoved a chip into her mouth as Snape’s jaundiced gaze roved over her and doubtless found her wanting. He made her feel like a child with everything to prove again. She forced herself not to fidget or speak._ _

__They ate in silence, Hermione bursting with questions and Snape alternately eyeing her and his food. When he was finished, he carefully unfolded the wet nap from its tiny package and cleaned himself fastidiously, methodically, finger by finger._ _

__“Have you told Potter?” he asked._ _

__“No,” she said. Harry, and his hard-won peace, did not need to be disturbed by this spectre from the past. She didn’t even know what he would do. Rage, weep, collapse? No, of course she hadn’t told Harry._ _

__“The Minister?”_ _

__“Kingsley is not exactly my bosom friend, Professor, to be seen and told secrets at any possible opportunity.”_ _

__“Weasley then?”_ _

__“Yes, I told George.”_ _

__“Granger!”_ _

__“And Fred, who hangs about as a ghost shouting out points as his twin and I shag in increasingly creative positions.”_ _

__“I suppose you find yourself amusing.”_ _

__“I made you a promise, Professor,” Hermione said. “And like you, I keep my promises.”_ _

__Snape stood and gathered his plate and hers to deposit them at the sink. She watched him lean on his hands over the sink, head bowed, taking measured breaths. Hermione dropped her gaze to her own greasy fingers and made short work of her own wet nap._ _

__Snape sat heavily back down beside her._ _

__“I’m not your professor,” he said. “And you won’t like my answers.”_ _

__“It’s not about liking or not liking them, Mr. Snape. I simply want to emulate your path.”_ _

__“You shouldn’t,” he said. “It is as you say: I have few customers, and when I get them I prove a poor host. I believed being a chemist and running my own shop would provide me the freedom and intellectual stimulation I craved in a field that bore a passing similarity to potions; I was wrong. The master I serve now is merely...”_ _

__“Capitalism?”_ _

__“Quite.”_ _

__“Mr. Snape—”_ _

__“I go by Stephen Savage here, Miss Granger. But in private, I suppose you may call me Severus. It fell easily enough from your tongue the other day.”_ _

__“Oh. Then you should call me Hermione.”_ _

__“Shakespeare enthusiasts, your parents?”_ _

__“And that’s so much worse than being enamoured of the Roman emperors?”_ _

__“Not at all, I merely wished to commend them for their taste and pomposity.”_ _

__“How did you become a chemist?”_ _

__“The usual way.”_ _

__“You went to university? Just like that?”_ _

__“No, not ‘just like that,’ you twit,” Snape said. “I knew I wouldn’t survive the war. And if by some miracle I did, I still couldn’t, do you understand?”_ _

__“You planned this,” Hermione said. “You never even entertained the thought of staying.”_ _

__Snape rolled his eyes._ _

__“Don’t look so betrayed, Granger; you didn’t even like me. I never expected to survive, but I had to make contingency plans for the off chance I would. That meant forging a Muggle identity, including a first from Cambridge.”_ _

__Hermione rolled her eyes. “Naturally,” she said._ _

__“Where would you have gone, had you been nothing but a Muggle girl with no saviour to pull out of fires at regular intervals?”_ _

__“I—”_ _

__“Oxford or Cambridge, and do not pretend otherwise.”_ _

__“Maybe Harvard.”_ _

__“Do you want to hear this or not?”_ _

__Hermione swept a hand out in invitation._ _

__“After a lifetime of frugality, invention, and few expenses, I found myself quite a comfortable man. I also collected inheritances as the scion of two old families on my mother’s side, half-blood or no. And Albus—” Snape cleared his throat. “—Albus left me a sizeable nest egg. His small way of trying to take care of me, I expect. In the years leading up to the final battle, I slowly converted my galleons into pounds sterling, bought a flat, and waited.”_ _

__“Who took care of you?” Hermione asked. “When you were bitten?”_ _

__“The NHS,” Snape bit out._ _

__“That’s it?” Hermione said. “You really told no one? Confided in no one?”_ _

__“Do you want to hear the story or not, Miss Granger?”_ _

__“Proceed, _Mr._ Snape.”_ _

__“Recovery was a long road, as you surmise,” Snape said after getting a good glare in. “It took a few years to come back to something resembling my full strength, but I was also eating heartily and served no masters for the first time in my life. I felt…strangely light. It made me believe I should make myself useful. I had spent a great deal of time reading chemistry and other sciences, as I might have done had I attended university, so that by the time I applied for the MPharm program, I was behind in nothing but the social niceties of attending university.”_ _

__Snape stood and pottered about banging cabinet doors and clinking mugs._ _

__“Tea?” he asked._ _

__“Please,” Hermione said._ _

__He set the kettle on and turned back to face her, bum leaning against the counter, arms crossed._ _

__“Most small businesses require a loan from a bank, same as among wizards. I was able to bypass that. My business isn’t particularly flush, but it suits me fine. I do have some customers for whom the shop proves conveniently located. For you, you’ll have to set up a not-for-profit organisation. I do wonder if it would be beneficial for you to approach the Muggle government, private charities, or even a church. I may have a book around here somewhere with illuminating details, but you’re far more likely find something more up to date and useful at a proper library. And that, Miss Granger, is the rather uninspiring story of how I came to run my own chemist’s.”_ _

__“I thought we were going to call each other by our given names.”_ _

__“The way you bumble about like a schoolgirl makes that difficult for me.”_ _

__“I do not bumble,” Hermione said. “I simply don’t care for social niceties when they are employed to very nicely refuse to do what’s right. Which is not terribly dissimilar from someone else I know.”_ _

__“Hmph.”_ _

__“You’re actually very admirable you know.”_ _

__“‘ _Actually?’_ ”_ _

__“Of course there’s the great tragic hero claptrap,” Hermione said, waving a hand. “Harry Potter, fresh off of killing Voldemort, singing your praises at every turn, never saying a thing in public that he didn’t find a way to connect to your great sacrifice. That Snape, that fantasy—of course it’s admirable, the same way a superhero is admirable. But I mean you, Severus. Just you, here with me, talking about how to make yourself useful to your neighbours, not how to make yourself an investment banker or a CEO getting rich off the backs of your employees, but as a chemist committed to easing your clientele through all manner of ailments, all in an effort to help me, one of the worst thorns in your sides in all your years at school, now that I have done nothing but disturb the peace you’ve built yourself. Yes, Severus, I find you quite admirable.”_ _

__The kettle was whistling. Snape stood frozen, staring at her._ _

__“The water’s done,” Hermione said._ _

__“You have a dizzying conversational style…Hermione.”_ _

__“I ask only that my conversational partners keep up.”_ _

__“Oh no,” Snape said. “I think the fact that most can’t is the entire point.”_ _

__Hermione smiled, too big, and Snape looked away. He busied himself preparing the tea and setting out an array of cream and sugar._ _

__“I didn’t know Fred Weasley had died,” he said, seating himself beside her once again. “Was it during the final battle, then?”_ _

__“Oh.” Hermione cleared her throat. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”_ _

__“What a bloody waste,” Snape muttered, as if to himself. Old grief tightened around Hermione’s lungs. She wrapped her hands around the hot mug._ _

__“Yes,” she said. “Would you…”_ _

__Snape looked up at her, eyes like a thunderstorm. He looked bewildered and, for all the lines around his mouth and eyes, like nothing so much as one of her charges at St. Hieronymus’: guileless, alone and so, so young._ _

__“Would you like to know who else didn’t make it?” she asked._ _

__He blinked and the effect was gone. He leaned back in his chair, gaze averted from her, and brought the mug up to his lips. He blew across the surface._ _

__“No,” he said. “No, I don’t believe I would.”_ _

__

__It was deep into the evening when Hermione rapped at the door of Ephigenia Hillcut. The door swung open to reveal Hermione’s friend as well as the expected arched brow and pursed lips she levelled in Hermione’s direction._ _

__“You’re meant to be waist-deep in muscular foreign men, Hermione Granger.”_ _

__“I’m afraid I’ve an idea.”_ _

__“Heaven forefend.” Ephigenia stepped aside._ _

__Hermione crossed the threshold and scuttled her shoes against the welcome mat._ _

__“You’re a star, Ephigenia.”_ _

__Ephigenia shut the door and swept past her to sit in her favourite chair, a recliner worn with age. Hermione waved off the offer of tea and settled into the settee opposite her._ _

__“Tell me or you’ll burst, darling,” Ephigenia said._ _

__“I think it’s time to take Squib Outreach out of the Ministry’s hands.”_ _

__Ephigenia folded herself into the recliner, propping an elbow on an armrest to cradle her head in one hand._ _

__“And Muggleborn Outreach?”_ _

__“Has fewer initiatives and more support from the Department of Social Welfare, plus more people qualified to step into my administrative role and more still to do the field work. Really, without an entire additional starved program yanking at their attention, the existing employees would probably be in a better position to shore it up.”_ _

__A faint smile touched Ephigenia’s lips even as her eyes narrowed._ _

__“You don’t actually want that.”_ _

__A single laugh clapped out of Hermione’s mouth. She brushed a hank of hair off of her forehead._ _

__“In a perfect world?” she said. “Of course I would do both. M.O.P. is important to me, and I have intimate knowledge of the social challenges Muggleborns face as well as a thousand ideas about how to effect societal change around it. But contrary to popular opinion, I am actually aware of my limits.” She shrugged and twisted her mouth into something that had aspirations toward smiling. “No one can devote their full attention to both, and I can see that even if the Ministry can’t. The programs are essentially inversions of each other and should never have been linked at all. The truth is, I _worry_ about Squib Outreach so much more. It’s less…” Hermione shook her head, casting about for politic words._ _

__“You can say it, you know,” Ephigenia said. “It’s less respected. There are fewer advocates.”_ _

__Hermione sighed._ _

__“I think it’s just not thought of at all, which is worse, somehow,” she said._ _

__“‘At least those upstart Muggleborns _have_ magic,’ they think,” Ephigenia said._ _

__Hermione tried not to look apologetic, but she did nod._ _

__“It’s ridiculous,” she said._ _

__“Of course it is,” Ephigenia said. “But it’s what we’ve got to work with.”_ _

__“I know I…owe it to you,” Hermione said. “To be your contact in the Ministry. I know there would be complications, especially at the beginning.”_ _

__“Hermione,” Ephigenia said. “We would support you, of course. All of us at St. Hieronymus’. And I’m sure we could get previous clients and adoptees to come forward in support, and you might be surprised to find one of them can and will rise to take your place as our Ministry liaison. The stuffy old wizards at the Ministry might not like it, but we ‘wayward squibs’ are citizens of this government and we are allowed in the building.”_ _

__Hermione’s heart swelled and she had to resist the heat rising behind her eyes._ _

__“Thank you,” she said. She cleared her throat. “I wouldn’t do it if you didn’t want me to. That is, if you or another…magic-free person—”_ _

__“Just say squib, darling, I’ll live.”_ _

__“—if a _squib_ wished to take the reins and spearhead their own organisation, I would be happy to step aside.”_ _

__Ephigenia steepled her fingers together before her lips and closed her eyes for a moment._ _

__“To be frank,” she said, “I do think that would be best, but that’s a dream for a far-off future. You are the only direct Ministry employee with the necessary resources and contacts in this position at this moment in time. Not to mention your social clout.”_ _

__“Ephigenia, you’re very capable—”_ _

__“Hermione.” Ephigenia’s hand came up to stop her. “I run a home for abandoned children, I do it well, and I don’t want to stop. I am not a bureaucrat, or a business person, or a powerful symbol, and I don’t have the temperament. At this time, other squibs who may be better suited for such a task have largely set themselves up in the Muggle world either on their own or through S.O.P. initiatives. You have been our staunchest ally for more than ten years, Hermione—I for one am not so boorish as to diminish what you’ve accomplished for us simply because you’re a witch working in a flawed system.”_ _

__“I want to make sure this is done right,” Hermione said._ _

__“Tell me,” Ephigenia said, “if, years ago, some purebloods, say your Weasleys, wanted to set up a foundation to help Muggleborns enter more smoothly into magical society, would you refuse?”_ _

__“Well, no,” Hermione said. “Although I would make sure there were multiple Muggleborns advising them every step of the way so they didn’t fuck up.”_ _

__Ephigenia grinned and raised an empty mug of tea._ _

__“And so you shall have a fleet of us Abominations Before God and Merlin pestering you at every turn.”_ _

__“Great Christ.” Hermione groaned. “We need to think of a better name.”_ _

__Ephigenia snorted. The mug came down on the side table without her lips having touched it._ _

__“I’ll consult the elders at the next great squib caucus.”_ _

__“You should have one! We could make a website.”_ _

__Ephigenia laughed._ _

__“One thing at a time, darling,” she said. “Let’s get us computer literate first.”_ _

__Hermione flung herself sideways in the settee with a great sigh._ _

__“There’s so much to _do_ ,” she said. “Securing funding first off, and finding an actual facility, and arranging all the permits thereof….”_ _

__“How did this notion take hold in the first place?” Ephigenia asked. “Horrid old bag though she may be, you can’t imagine Withersby would actually sack you.”_ _

__“She might,” Hermione said, “but I’ve gone beyond that possibility anyway. It’s been unviable for so long, I’ve been going spare over it even before my blow up. Then I met someone who—well.” Hermione smiled and wriggled in her seat a little too keenly. “Someone who made breaking away seem like a real option finally.”_ _

__“How so?”_ _

__“He’s done it,” Hermione said. “He leads a Muggle life, turned his back entirely on the wizarding world. I can’t say he doesn’t _use_ magic, precisely—it’s the sort of thing we can’t help but to be steeped in, being magical people—but he doesn’t exert his will over it the way wizards do. It wouldn’t surprise me if he doesn’t consciously dust or tidy up his flat because his magic is already doing it for him. Basic self-care type stuff, most likely unconscious. But it amazes me, to think a wizard could choose to refuse the power of magic. Once it was revealed to me, I knew I had been shown something essential about myself, and I don’t think I could live without it.”_ _

__Hermione shook herself as if from a reverie when she caught Ephigenia’s eyebrows bouncing in way that reminded her of old Groucho Marx skits her parents had on VHS. Ephigenia leaned forward in her recliner._ _

__“ _His flat?_ ” she said. “Hermione Granger, you’ve been sitting here all this time talking bureaucracy, meanwhile you’re keeping _having met someone and been to his flat which you find just so fascinating_ from me all this time? How dare you, honestly.”_ _

__“Piffle!”_ _

__“ _Piffle?_ Are you a hundred years old?”_ _

__“It’s not like that!” Hermione’s voice had gone shrill, and Ephigenia threw her head back in a hearty cackle._ _

__Snape’s eyes flashed in her mind: a deceptively delicate almond shape in a rich, burnt sugar brown, deep set and wide, lit with knowing. The image was gone as quickly as it came._ _


	2. Chapter 2

Hermione found herself back at The Apothecary three days later with a list of possible properties in hand. 

Snape was nowhere to be found, but after a few moments spent scanning the magazine rack, the door chimed and Hermione looked up. An elderly woman, stooped and swathed in a burgundy hijab that matched her lipstick, shuffled inside and made a slow progression to the counter. Hermione tried to be discreet, but she was eyeing her with great interest, and the woman lifted her head and regarded her with sparkling eyes.

“I’m just a customer like you, lass,” she said. “Not too thrilling, I promise.”

“I’m so sorry,” Hermione said. “It’s only I’ve never seen another one of S-Stephen’s customers before. It’s, erm, a bit of a hidden gem, this place, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t go anywhere else,” the woman said. “Mr. Savage does right by those of us who come here.”

“Ha. That’s—well. I would say hard to believe but he does have his moments, doesn’t he?”

Saving Harry, over and over again. Devoting his life to bringing down a monster. Taking the life of his dearest friend to ensure it in an errand of terrible mercy. He didn’t do things prettily or politely, but he did them, and Hermione suddenly wondered if no one but these Apothecary devotees had ever thanked him for it.

“He’s back there right now filling my order, faithfully as ever,” the woman said. “Every fortnight, I don’t even have to ring in; he knows I’m coming. Once, when I was too ill to come, he closed up shop and walked to my flat with my prescription and Lemsip and soup and a coconut drink I like. What other chemist would do this, even for us pitiable pensioners?”

“No one,” Hermione said, her voice rough. “He’s extraordinary.”

“A rude one, make no mistake!” the woman said with a laugh. “He does love to be rude, but, well. It’s all a bit of fun, I think. Part of his charm.”

A dark voice emerged from behind the partition.

“Are you spreading lies about me again, Mrs. Sandhu?”

“Always, Mr. Savage.” Mrs. Sandhu turned to face him as he stepped up to the counter. Hermione was stuck on the expression on his face; his mouth downturned but his eyes gone soft with crinkles gathering in the corners. They exchanged more words she didn’t hear, and Snape passed the bag gently into the woman’s gnarled fingers. 

Hermione plastered a polite smile on her face as Mrs. Sandhu passed her on the way to the door. As soon as she was through it, she faced Snape again.

“Are you going to make a habit of harassing my customers, Miss Granger?”

Hermione clutched the list in her fist. She steadied her breath before striding up to the counter and shoving it at him.

“It’s Hermione,” she said, “and I’m doing it. I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”

Snape glared down his nose at her but straightened out the bit of paper she’d given him and flicked his gaze at it for a fraction of a second.

“You thought I had nothing better to do than follow you around like a lapdog whilst you hem and haw over buildings you’re not yet ready to rent.”

“I _thought_ you had a discerning eye and more insight into operating in this context than I have!”

“I have a shop to run and customers to tend!” Snape said. “Or did you not notice despite hanging about incessantly?”

“ _Incessantly?_ ”

“We’re not friends, Miss Granger! If you don’t have a purchase to make, you may take your leave!”

Hermione plucked a Cadbury Turkish from the rack and slammed it down. 

“This entitles me to stay and scream at you!” 

“60 fucking p!”

Hermione scattered coins across the countertop.

“Bloody highway robbery!”

Snape slapped his hands on the coins to keep them from rolling off, and scowled so hard he looked like a cartoon. Hermione, chest heaving, began to laugh.

“Stop that!” Snape snapped. “Get out of my shop!”

“Let me buy you lunch, you prick,” Hermione said. “You don’t have to be difficult just because I found out you have a few squishy bits.”

Snape sneered.

“My bits are not squishy,” he said.

“Yes, they are,” she said. “I’ll wait if this isn’t a good time, but you’re going to lunch with me, and then we’re arranging a time to see these places and you can point out all their flaws to your heart’s content.” 

“And I don’t get a say in any of this?” 

“Afraid not.

“Why?”

Hermione peeled open her Cadbury bar and snapped off one square. She handed it to Snape, who stared at her. She snapped off another square and systematically popped off and ate the chocolate bits plane by plane until she was left with a lurid magenta bit of half-solid jelly. This, she ate with zeal. Snape put his square in his mouth and appeared to hold it there without agenda.

“Because,” Hermione said when she’d chewed and swallowed. “You like me, for whatever reason, or you wouldn’t have helped me at all. And, God help me, I like you too. Looks like we _are_ friends, Stephen, whether you like it or not.”

Snape scowled again, but Hermione saw it: he bit down on his chocolate.

 

Lunch was at an empty Bangladeshi restaurant that served hot and tender naans the size of pennant flags. Snape’s method of eating his lamb madras was oddly dainty. As Hermione watched him tear up his garlic naan into precise strips and dip them just so in his curry, she was reminded quite suddenly of his demonstrations in Potions class: those early days, when he was still teaching them the techniques for the preparation of ingredients, and the differences between all those techniques. Slowly at first, so they could see exactly what he was doing, spare motions without flourish, total bodily control as simple as breathing. Later, he would prepare ingredients in the blink of an eye, his hands as graceful and efficient as the fluttering of a hummingbird’s wings. Later still, he would stop preparing ingredients for them at all, and coax from all of them, sometimes harshly, the capacity to lay out a passable mise en scene. 

Hermione reflected that even the most proficient Potions students among her year could never hope to reach the achievements in alacrity and elegance Professor Snape possessed. For her part, when she left off living with Harry and Ron and Kreacher to embark on her own adult life, she had proved to be accurate and efficient in the kitchen, and it dawned on her that perhaps she had the man frowning into his curry before her to thank for that.

“What,” Snape said.

“Hm?”

“You’re staring at me like an imbecile.”

“I was reminded of your lessons,” she said. “A bit of a surprise, as I don’t often think back on my Hogwarts days.”

Snape’s gaze was sharp and consuming; it made her feel both self-conscious and like the only person in the world. 

“The vast majority of our acquaintance consists of time during which I was your professor,” he said. “I had thought that would be all you could think of in my company.”

“I suppose it’s in the background,” Hermione said. “Informing our interactions without being at the forefront of my mind, if that makes sense. I am, as they say, pushing forty. I don’t dwell on memories of secondary school, extraordinary though those years were.”

Snape humphed, though it sounded more half-hearted than put-out. He pushed some curry onto a strip of naan and popped it neatly into his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Hermione said. “It didn’t occur to me that you may be experiencing our renewed acquaintance differently. Is it very difficult, having to remember?”

Snape sighed and averted his gaze. He finished chewing and swallowed before saying, “‘Difficult’ is not the word I would choose. I admit I was surprised by your sudden appearance in my shop, and incensed at the idea that you may tell all and sundry where I was, but I know now that that was a moment of panic for me, not rationality. I had let it lie for so long, I thought I could be free of my past, but that’s not a rational thought, either. The past is and I cannot unmake it.”

Hermione plugged her mouth up with some korma lest she say something to spook him. He ventured another moment of eye contact and then dropped his gaze to his meal.

“I was young,” he said, so quietly. “I felt old at the time, old and used up and so weary and battered and ready for everything to be over, but I was barely your age at the end of it all.”

Hermione nodded and dropped a hand to her lap so she couldn’t reach out and touch his. 

“When I think of it,” she said, “that’s what I think of too. How young we were. How strong we were asked to be. Sometimes it doesn’t feel real. I’m blasting ancient coffee rings from my desk, a stack of papers ten centimetres high needs my signature, and someone comes in to tell me who said what scandalous thing to whom three floors down. It’s so…removed from everything that came before.”

“Yes,” Snape said. “I fill orders. I tell customers about side effects. I tidy the magazine rack.”

Hermione’s mouth curved up. 

“And help old age pensioners,” she said. 

Snape looked away.

“Tell me about him,” he said.

Hermione took a moment to eat three more bites. The silence between them seemed magnified by the bustle of the street outside. Cars and conversations and music. 

“He spent a long time trying to be an Auror,” she said, “but it was never a good fit for him, just what everyone else said was his true calling. He’d never been given a chance to become something wholly himself—be the hero, Harry, be the saviour, be the second coming of the great James Potter, Auror and martyr. An entire society’s fantasies and expectations piled onto him and they were surprised when he buckled under the pressure?”

Snape’s eyebrow arched upward. Hermione sighed.

“He went off the rails for a bit, a total whirlwind of, you know, the usual things, until suddenly he’s resigned from the Aurors to avoid being sacked and he’s off to God knows where and no one can find him. Ron and George and Ginny and I—we looked and looked, even got Kingsley and the Headmistress involved but, well. If Harry doesn’t want to be found, he can make sure he’s not found.”

She wiped up some korma with her naan and ate it, chewing with deliberate slowness. It was harder for her to remember this than the war. The war, at least, had its trajectory, its dangers and traumas and knife-edge tension, but it also had its clear conclusion. The helplessness and fear and speculation around Harry’s disappearance still haunted her, even when he came back safe, more centred than she’d ever known him.

“In the end, he was gone for more than five years,” she said. “It was Luna Lovegood who found him, quite by accident, whilst on the trail of something or other in Nepal. He had been traveling, seeing the world, seeking out non-Western magics and philosophies and even his own heritage. He and Luna fell in love, and after a while he was ready to come back to us. All that time away seeing different perspectives was good for him. The way he did it hurt us, of course. He could have left a bloody note, you know? But later, I came to understand why he did it. I can’t blame him for it, even though it’s still a wound.”

“If ever there were one action of his I understood, it’s that one,” Snape said.

Hermione snorted.

“Of course you’d approve,” she said. “You and he have far more in common than you’ll ever admit to.”

Snape sneered. 

“He even went into healthcare, just like you,” she said. Snape made a rumbling sound Hermione couldn’t interpret. “When he got back, he had to play catch up on the prerequisites for a Healing program through St. Mungo’s, but now he’s in the thick of it. He’s about to complete his general mastery, and then he’s going to continue on for specialty certification.”

“And what, pray tell, is his specialty to be?” Snape said. “Emergency medicine for quidditch players? Stitching up impulsive idiots with more recklessness than brains?”

“It seems as though none of us escape our pasts, Severus,” Hermione said. “We are shaped by things outside our control and then when we least expect it, it repeats on us. Sometimes freedom from it means leaning in.” Snape’s brow furrowed, and Hermione shook her head as if clearing away cobwebs. “He’ll be in paediatrics, with a focus on healing and rehabilitating children who experience abuse and neglect. I’m hoping he’ll popularise the field and in a few years St. Hieronymus’ can employ a live-in Healer.” 

Snape dropped his gaze to the table top, eating methodically. Hermione scooped out more korma for herself. Harry and Snape were two people with a great deal left to say to one another, and Hermione wondered now if she had poked a sleeping bear.

“I always thought you would marry Weasley and begin populating the earth as soon as possible,” Snape said suddenly. Hermione pulled a face at him, and he looked smug about it, straightening up in his chair with a smirk.

“I was at the top of my class!” she said. “I was never going to settle into….housewifery.” She frowned. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a housewife, mind. But early marriage and scads of children were never in the cards for me.”

One of Snape’s shoulders rose and fell in a delicate shrug.

“It happened to a lot of girls,” he said. “More the rule than the exception, even for bright, promising ones like you.”

Hermione couldn’t even absorb the compliment. How many girls and women had she seen over the years give up their own ambitions for home and hearth? Choices for women were hardly choices at all in a society so steeped in blood politics and the preservation thereof; women were the broodmares of the entire system. It was part of why she did the work she did, but social change was so slow as to be demoralising.

“It would never have been Ron and me anyway,” she said. “He’s quite settled with Draco.”

Snape choked on madras, eyes bulging, and Hermione tucked her lips behind her teeth to keep from laughing. She pushed a glass of water toward him.

“You’re _joking_ ,” he rasped after a long gulp of water.

“Afraid not,” Hermione said, suppressing a grin. “They caused a bit of a splash when it all came out back in ’03, but the press was always more concerned about what Harry was up to back then to linger on anything else for too long. They’re that sickening married couple who are still happy decades in and everyone else hates them.”

“I—” Snape shook his head. “I can’t imagine it.”

“Is it the fact that they’re two men, or is it the particular combination?”

“Give me some credit,” Snape said. “The scion of the great Malfoy family, tasked with securing the next generation of spoiled little brats, tying himself to the sixth son of an impoverished Ministry cog? They were at each other’s necks for six solid years. Don’t tell me you saw it coming.”

“I’m used to it by now, though it came as a shock at the time,” Hermione said.

“How did it even happen?” 

“We had to rebuild Hogwarts,” Hermione said. “The older Death Eaters were sentenced to Azkaban, but a lot of the younger ones who didn’t actually have blood on their hands were sentenced to community service. Draco, Pansy and Theo were at Hogwarts with us. Millicent was there too, though she wasn’t doing community service, of course. Ron and Draco were assigned to assist each other, which was quite explosive at first, as you can imagine. I suppose we all should have suspected something when the cat and dog fighting ended and the heated banter and disappearing for hours on end began.” She shrugged and one corner of her mouth lifted up in half a smile. “I think we were too relieved by the silence to question it.”

“Did you—” Snape’s mouth snapped shut and he looked away.

“Did I what?”

“Did you—love him.” Snape’s voice was thick, and he stumbled over the pertinent word. 

Hermione shifted in her seat and sighed. 

“No,” she said. “Though I thought so at the time. We were very young. I’ve learned since that real love is different than what I felt, which was excitement and lust and the kind of abiding affection one can have for a friend, which can often be more intense than romance. And I’ve also come to believe that romantic love can’t become true until it’s reciprocated. Poor Ron tried, but he could never have loved me, or any woman, the way he loves Draco. That’s not anyone’s fault.”

Snape was nodding, still not looking at her. She swallowed, and ventured to poke the bear again.

“Do you know what I mean?” 

Snape met her eyes, and in them she found a vast understanding.

“Yes,” he said. “I used to have—a friend.”

Hermione’s heart ached. She imagined them—tiny Severus and Lily, side by side on the swings, learning just what extraordinary thing they had in common. All their lives ahead of them.

“I’ve had my romances,” Hermione said. “Even fancied myself in love once or twice.” Snape’s eyes dropped again. “But it never really worked out. How about you, Severus?” He grunted. “Come on, you can’t interrogate me and not expect me to ask back in kind.”

Snape issued a long-suffering sigh. 

“I have, occasionally, been on dates,” he said, each word like a pulled tooth.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, damn you!” He scowled.

“And? Give up a detail or two or I’ll never let it go; you know this.”

Snape pressed his lips together and sat back in his chair, crossing his arms.

“And nothing,” he said. “Some time ago there was a museum curator and we suited for a few years.”

“ _Years!_ ”

“Three and a half years, yes.” He rolled his eyes. “We parted ways when she declared me too secretive and reticent to ‘express myself.’ What is there to express? We were together, it was good, that’s an expression in itself.”

“Women like to hear they’re appreciated, Severus.”

“Hmph.”

“You were secretive about your past?”

“Of course I was,” he said. “She was a Muggle, and I was—trying.”

Hermione tilted her head. He looked so hilariously _grumpy_ , half-pouting with hair falling in his eyes. 

“You can’t change who or what you are, Severus,” she said. “You could have told her.” He shook his head. She felt a heaviness settle over her—had he never been able to be his true self around anyone in all his life? Was he hiding, even now, even from himself?

“I didn’t want to be a wizard anymore,” he said. “Foolish, perhaps, but I thought I could choose something and have it be simple for once in my life. Where once I’d seen Muggles as the root of all my problems, suddenly it was magic that was the essential ill of my life.”

“And now?” Hermione asked.

“I have no interest in the wizarding world,” he said. “But I know running from being a wizard would be like running from being a pallid Englishman.”

Hermione laughed.

“I’m glad you’re letting me be your friend, Severus,” she said. Pink touched his cheeks and he rolled his shoulders inward.

“I suspect Hermione Granger finds ways to get exactly what she wants, when she wants it,” he grumbled. If he meant it as an insult, it didn’t land.

“If I really got my way, all those blood status terms would be outdated and embarrassing,” she said. “Purebloods, half-bloods, my God. Are they dogs? If you called someone a half-breed out in the real world, you’d catch a fist to the mouth, and you’d deserve it, too.”

Severus’s brows were furrowed in thought.

“So the Muggle world is the real world?” he said.

“You know what I mean,” Hermione said. “The very consideration of blood status is a form of discrimination.”

“It is,” Severus said. “The language itself privileges purebloods, but likewise, if you take it away, you remove the cultural context from the lived experience of discrimination.”

Hermione sighed.

“I just wish there were a better way to talk about it. There’s nothing ‘pure’ about people without Muggle heritage, and nothing sullied about people with it. We should be able to discuss blood status and bigotry without passing an automatic value judgement.”

“I used to hate idealists,” Severus said.

Hermione rolled her eyes.

“What are you, I wonder, but an idealist?” she said. Severus’s gazed dropped away.

“There’s really no such thing as a pureblood anyway,” he said. “Muggles, wizards—we are all one people, risen from the same well. Some have magic and some do not.”

Hermione had never heard this articulated before. In her research on where magic comes from, too many authors were coy about how Muggleborns could ever come to be, or how squibs might be born into families with otherwise strong magic. When she committed to developing Squib Outreach, she’d had to stop her research into the origins of magic. It was too depressing to read what these wizarding authors, old and new, thought of her little charges. 

“Purebloods don’t want to admit that if they have children at all, it means there’s a Muggle or two not too far back in the family tree,” Severus said.

“God, really?” Hermione said, eyebrows springing upward.

Severus smirked. 

“Can you imagine the gene pool if not?”

“I don’t have to imagine,” Hermione said. “I went to school with Vincent Crabbe.”

Severus laughed then, a real, unabashed, hearty laughed. Hermione was heady with it, and she wondered how she could get him to do it again.

 

Hermione sought a vast commercial property, including several stories and acres of pleasant grounds, but she wished for it to be more homey than clinical. It was to be a space for Muggle job training and skill acquisition as well as a community centre with various activities and programming, not to mention a legal office and several kinds of therapy. She even hoped to bring in Healers and doctors alike for an eventual medical team, squib physiology being rather something between Muggle and magical. When her mind ran away from her, she imagined squibs developing their own medical practices and providing specific services that had gone neglected for millennia. 

The sticky wicket with finding the right facility was that it needed to be in a Muggle space close to a population centre like London, but removed from high traffic areas enough that the appearance of a witch or wizard wouldn’t be cause for alarm. Despite the travails of those Hermione had the most contact with, who tended to be the worst cases in the wizarding world, many squibs were still perfectly capable of having magical children, or marrying magical people, or having loving magical friends and family members. Access to the resources and opportunities the centre would provide could not be contingent upon turning entirely away from the wizarding world.

Severus seemed to have entirely different priorities. 

“There’s an independent cinema nearby,” he’d said in Uxbridge.

In Edmonton, “Is that a book shop around the corner?”

In Hayes, “This is near a fine library.”

In Enfield, “Fifteen mobile repair shops and not a single museum.”

In Rainham, simply, “Soulless.”

Hermione chalked it up to a loss for the day, though no great one. It wasn’t as if they were anywhere near leasing yet, and Severus had patently refused to Apparate by himself, so she was exhausted from the effort of popping them both from Edinburgh to London and back, not to mention to all the disparate rental locations.

After a late lunch, she Apparated them into a secluded section of Holyrood Park, where not too far away, Arthur’s Seat loomed against the steel-grey Scottish sky, looking like nothing so much as an oil painting one could reach out and touch. Light refracted behind it like the brushstrokes of a Dutch master. Severus took off with long strides before Hermione had the chance to stop gaping at the view, and she had to jog to catch up.

“Have some mercy for the short-statured among us, Severus,” she said, panting.

“The short-statured among us should hurry along so we can get to Plaisir du Chocolat before it rains,” Severus said. 

“What?”

“I’m taking you to a chocolate shop but only if you quit standing about agog.”

“There’s a little mountain in the middle of the city!”

“And a few castles, too—don’t tell me you’re going to be star-struck every time you see one.” He slanted a smirk at her. “You grew up in one, if I recall correctly.”

The grounds were lush and well-kept, but proved curiously empty of other people. They passed, indeed, a small castle. Hermione’s mind spat out trivia indiscriminately: it was a _palace_ , not a _castle_ , and Mary Queen of Scots was born there, though the structure would have been wholly different in the sixteenth century. Hermione felt Severus’s eyes on her, and when she glanced over, his brows were drawn together and his mouth was thin and tight. He looked as fierce as ever like that, but she realised quite abruptly that he wasn’t angry—that was merely his face, lost in thought. 

“Have you never been to Edinburgh, Miss—Hermione?” Severus asked.

“Of course I have!” she said. “It’s a good small city to introduce the children to whilst not overwhelming them with the differences in—culture. We have been to the zoo, and the botanical gardens, and—”

“Have you never been here to enjoy it properly, without ten sets of grubby little hands pawing at you, without _work_?”

Hermione tilted her chin up and looked resolutely in front of her. They were nearly out of the park, now. She could see the end of the Canongate and the Royal Mile, wreathed in tree cover.

“I’ve come to see you,” she said.

Severus scoffed. 

“You’re one to talk!” Hermione said. “Do you _do_ leisure travel, Mr. Snape?”

“All I hear is the echo of all your little chums telling you to take a holiday,” Severus said. 

Hermione shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. She was still walking briskly just to keep up.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said.

“It’s that your initiatives may actually fall apart without you,” Severus said. She glanced at him. His eyes cut to hers and fell away just as quickly. A couple holding hands bounded past them into the park, propelled by bottom-of-the-hill gravity.

“I suppose it’s an arrogant thought,” Hermione said. 

“It is arrogance in the middle manager who believes he has browbeaten his department into total dependence; it is realism in the director who has built her programs from the ground up under the dubious supervision of a petty tyrant who cares for naught but his own standing.”

The wind ruffled his hair, and he brushed inky, overgrown locks off his forehead. That Roman nose led him up the hill with dignity as if he were Hadrian himself. Hermione knew she was staring, but for his part, Severus gazed steadily ahead.

“Careful,” she said. “I might take that as a compliment.”

“You should see Edinburgh, Hermione,” he said. “You should stand on the crest of the Crags and take in the sprawl of the city down below. You should join the revellers at Beltane on Calton Hill. You should load up your bag at the anarchist book fair in Leith.”

“You really love it here,” Hermione said. Her face burned and she tucked her chin into her chest; of course he loved it here. “What is it about this place? Why not Canada, Australia, South Africa?” _If he were going to run, why not run far?_

The farther up the hill they trudged, the more people they had to share the pavement with. The sky darkened and a light rain began to mist over the high street. A few storefronts and a dozen pedestrians passed before he responded.

“It’s the weather,” he said, and Hermione was startled by the volume of the laugh that clapped out of her.

He stopped in front of a chocolatier and held open the door for her with a crooked little half-smile on his face. Hermione’s heart flopped around like a choking fish. _Oh no_ , she thought.

The little cafe was the picture of decadence; beautiful chocolate tarts and truffles in the case, an endless array of chocolate bars and drinking chocolate and novelties on the shelves. She felt Severus come in behind her and let the door fall shut.

“Better than anything at Honeydukes,” he murmured into her ear, and she shivered. Before she could decide he was making his intentions known, he moved away from the door, from her, to step up to the case, where a woman in an apron greeted him with a smile.

“Hiya, Stephen,” she said, and turned her smile up a thousand watts when she caught Hermione’s eye. “Shall I make up your usual then?”

“Two, I think,” Severus said. “And whatever my…colleague wants.”

“Oh dear,” said Hermione. “I couldn’t possibly choose.”

“Take your time,” Severus said. In a single step he was in the seating area arranging his jacket on a chair. “I’ve ordered you the finest drinking chocolate in Scotland and a single sea-salt caramel covered in dark chocolate.”

Hermione didn’t want to look at him with giant calf’s eyes and she wasn’t certain she could control it, so she forced herself to consider the contents of the case. Everything was so beautiful, nothing less than art in tempered chocolate. She wasn’t certain she was up for an entire slice of tart in addition to the caramel. She moved to the shelving, where slabs of dark chocolate with bright spots of colour caught her eye. She picked one up; the colourful bits were edible flowers, their petals candied and strewn across the tops of these gorgeous chocolate bars whilst they lay cooling. Violets and roses and hibiscus and lilacs. And they were £12 per bar. She wanted all of them but grabbed only the two she couldn’t choose between—the violet and the rose—and set them on the counter.

The employee still appeared as if she were bursting at the sight of her.

“Go on,” she said. “Himself’s got you covered.”

“Please,” Hermione said. “I’ll pay for these.”

“Nonsense,” came Severus’s voice. “Think of it as a thank you for all your transport assistance today.”

Hermione turned only to find he wasn’t even looking at her. He had his nose stuck in a newspaper, brow furrowed, brackets deepening around the corners of his mouth. His crossed legs stuck out beyond the space of the little table, impossibly long in his slim cut charcoal trousers. Hermione’s breath caught. She swallowed and turned back to the register too quickly. The employee had her lips tucked behind her teeth, but it did little to hide her beaming.

“I couldn’t possibly go against the wishes of one of our favourite regulars, you understand,” she said. Hermione suppressed a Snape-like scowl. She thanked her and brought her two chocolate bars over to Severus’s table.

“I wouldn’t have got two if I’d known you were going to insist,” she said as she settled into a chair. 

“You’ll want some of the drinking chocolate for home as well,” Severus said. He turned a page. “I’ll have Aoife add it to my tab.”

“Stephen!”

The newspaper came down in a snap. An eyebrow arched up. Hermione couldn’t believe she’d never noticed the fineness of his eyes before.

“So far you’ve bought me lunch twice and taken me all over the country.”

“As a favour to me!”

“Then consider this a favour to me,” he said. He flicked his gaze down at the flowered chocolates. “Those are a personal favourite of mine as well.”

“Have one.” Hermione pushed the roses over.

Severus rolled his eyes.

“Is this how you treat Potter and Weasley at Christmas?” he asked. “At your birthday?”

“It’s not my birthday,” Hermione said, her voice small. Severus eyed the chocolate bar with disdain until she drew it back to herself. “Thank you, Stephen,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” he said. His gaze lingered on her face before he dropped it again. She got the distinct impression he was no longer reading the paper. She bit her lip; being a person others most commonly referred to as “intimidating,” even when they professed attraction to her, she was unaccustomed to the unspoken push and pull of flirtation in its infancy. People didn’t _flirt_ with Hermione Granger. She didn’t know if Severus were flirting, or if he knew as much about flirting as she, or if he were simply navigating how to build a friendship with someone like her for the first time. A former student. A witch. Someone who knew him. 

She wanted to say something pithy and light; she wanted to say something bold; she wanted to say what she was feeling even if she didn’t know what that was yet.

“So which property did you like best today?” she said, and died inside.

“There were two in Uxbridge I found passable,” he said. “The cinema near the first one was playing something from Hungary and not a single superhero film.”

Hermione huffed. 

“Again with the cinema,” she said. “What about the facilities themselves?” Personally, she found all of them too cold and clinical. She thought they should branch out into estate properties that could be converted to fit their needs.

“The Admirers of Mrs. Norris should know what wonders this side of things offers,” Severus said. He passed the paper onto the next table. “If you’re really going to do this, it’s not only the facility or the grounds or what kind of practical programming you can implement. It’s about revealing a whole world, as fantastical to them as school once was to you. You should be thinking about proximity to leisure activities like the library, the cinema, the bloody silly video game shops and comic book stores and rugby clubs. You must offer them all the joys of a new kind of life, not just the means by which to access it.”

“Oh.” Hermione felt like a child again, so caught up in a schoolbook that she didn’t realise she was missing the teacher’s actual instruction.

“Films, fiction, music,” Severus said. “There are some things the Mu—the _Scots_ simply do better than us.”

“Why do you think that is?”

His eyes lit with zeal and he opened his mouth to respond, but Aoife chose that moment to bring out their drinking chocolate and caramels. As she turned to leave them, she sent Hermione a wink. Hermione snapped her attention back to Severus, who was leaning over his steaming mug and breathing deeply.

“I’ve come to believe it’s imagination,” he said. He sat up and met her gaze again. His attention was arresting, consuming, and she was caught as if in orbit. “The ordinary Englishmen of no particular talent believes himself to be at the height of his powers whilst achieving nothing of note. Keeping house, drudging through work, taking in some footie, puffing up with pride about the kids, bickering with the wife, gossiping about the neighbours, pitying or hating the—immigrants. He doesn’t have to think about anything because he’s been convinced by all his people’s history that he’s the end all be all of civilisation.” 

Severus lifted the mug to his lips and blew across the surface of his drinking chocolate. He took a long sip and visibly savoured what he tasted. When he set the mug down, he smirked, and Hermione’s heart fluttered.

“But Scots,” he said. “Scots just get on with it, don’t they? They couldn’t see at night so they harnessed the great natural power of electricity. They had no efficient means of communication, so they invented the telegram, the telephone, the mobile. They couldn’t travel far on their own so they tamed horses, built railways, made cars. They wanted to reach across the world and know who was on the other end so they dreamed up the ship, the aeroplane, the internet. And before any of that crossed anyone’s mind, before words could pass their lips in any semblance of language, they created art so they could show each other no one must be alone. Plays, poetry, painting, sculpture, weaving, music, even bloody Legos—we create not because it puts the gas in the lamp but because it gives the light something to shine on.” 

Tears dropped from Hermione’s lashes. Severus, colour up and expression open, seemed to come back to himself abruptly and sat back in his chair. He turned his face away.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’ve never—” He shook his head and swallowed his words away. 

Hermione wiped her eyes.

“Had anyone to talk to before,” she said. His eyes slid back to hers. They were a rich brown, like good, fertile earth. “I know how that feels.” 

He swelled with a deep breath and let it out slowly. He drank more of his chocolate, and Hermione ventured a taste of hers. It was divine, and Hermione’s eyes fell shut at the taste. Warmed from the inside and heartened against her exhaustion, she wondered if she’d ever really had chocolate before this moment. When she opened her eyes, Severus was gazing at her, expression indecipherable. 

“It’s not that I think the English are all lazy dullards and Scots embody the very essence of human creativity,” he said, voice low. “We lived in extraordinary times, amongst extraordinary people. But I couldn’t stay in—” He cleared his throat. “—England.” 

“Do you—” Hermione bit her lip.

“What,” Severus said.

“Do you want to run this place with me?” she said. “You could be, I don’t know, Director of Culture, or something.”

Severus snorted and raised his mug again. 

“I’m a chemist,” he said, “and I live in Edinburgh.”

Hermione picked up the caramel and bit it neatly in half. The taste was indecent and she could only hope her face were fit to be in public. Severus never looked away.

“Come to the cinema with me,” he blurted. His cheeks went pink.

Hermione licked the salt from her lips. 

“I’d like that,” she said.

 

The Minister for Magic couldn’t pop ’round to the Leaky for a Firewhiskey like someone’s mate. Even if he could, Kingsley Shacklebolt was hardly someone Hermione went down the pub with on a whim; he was friendly with her, and had been, once upon a time, a sort of brother in arms. He wasn’t the type to forget that, even if they had never done anything social together beyond greeting each other at a Ministry ball. Hermione assured herself of their cordial relationship as she sent off an owl inviting him to tea at her flat. He would see right through it, she was sure, but she had to try.

 _I’ll see you at teatime,_ came the reply.

At precisely 4 o’clock, Kingsley Shacklebolt emerged from Hermione’s fireplace in shimmering purple robes, looking for all the world as if nineteen years hadn’t passed since he was appointed Acting Minister.

“Minister,” Hermione said, hands outstretched to shake his.

“Honestly, Hermione, haven’t we known each other long enough?” They shook hands, smiling at each other.

“Kingsley, then,” Hermione said. “Please.” She led him into her sitting room, where a tea service complete with scones and clotted cream awaited them. When they were settled in, she asked him how he’d been doing.

“The usual political balancing act,” he said with a sigh. “This week’s thorn in my side is that bloody Purity First group. They’re contesting the results of the vote to transition the Wizengamot to an elected body, and their hateful little propaganda papers are everywhere. Did you know I found some in Euphrates’s book bag? He’s nine years old.” Kingsley had met his wife whilst serving as protective detail for the Muggle Prime Minister during the war; she was a Muggle, their children half-bloods.

“Oh, Kingsley, that’s awful,” Hermione said. “I’ve been so caught up in my own whirlwind I didn’t even notice. Can I help?”

“Don’t worry about this fringe group,” Kingsley said. “We’ve got agents on them, both Aurors and Unspeakables, and I know your plate is full to bursting. Which, speaking of…” He levelled a knowing look at her over his teacup. “I understand you have a few more days left of your administrative leave, and if I know you, holiday hasn’t made you idle. Don’t keep me in suspense, Hermione.”

Hermione sat up straight and squared her shoulders. Kingsley looked amused but kept his mouth shut and tilted his head.

“I’m aware this is all very unorthodox,” she said, “and that I’m presuming upon our relationship in order to bypass the usual channels, but I thought if I got your support—” She paused for a deep breath.

“That I could make whatever it is you’re about to do easier with my approval.”

Hermione hid a wince with a shrug.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Kingsley had a big, toothy, infectious smile, and his eyes crinkled so well when he did it. He took a sip of his tea.

“No you’re not,” he said. “Tell me what it is or I’ll go mad from the anticipation.”

“I want to remove Squib Outreach from the Department of Social Welfare and expand it as a private not-for-profit organisation.”

Kingsley set his teacup down and sat back, folding his hands over his belly. He let out a long breath and considered her with shuttered eyes.

“You know Phaedra Withersby can’t actually fire you even if she wanted to,” he said. “She’d need my approval, which she would never get, but beyond that, she’s shrewd enough to know S.O.P. and M.O.P. don’t function without you.”

“It’s not about that anymore,” Hermione said. “I can’t run both, and the need of S.O.P.’s clients outstrip what S.O.P. in its current incarnation is able to provide. We’re underfunded and understaffed. The employees are worn too thin. _I’m_ worn too thin. If Squib Outreach exits the Ministry, those problems are solved, and the program can actually grow to meet the needs of the population it serves.”

“What you’re not saying is that when S.O.P. goes, so do you.”

“‘When,’ Kingsley?”

“Hermione.” 

“Yes,” she said. “I would quit the Ministry in order to set up and run the centre.”

“And Muggleborn Outreach?”

“Emer Omwe’ke and Laeda Lorcan have been proving their mettle every day for years,” Hermione said. “Either would make a fine program head and probably have new ideas that could invigorate the department.”

Kingsley brought the knot of his hands to rest in front of his mouth and rubbed the bulb of his nose against his knuckles idly. Hermione had to remind herself to breathe. She could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in her office. After minutes spent in silence, Kingsley leaned forward, planted his elbows on the table, and looked Hermione in the eye.

“It would take a long time,” he said. Hermione’s stomach jumped clear into her throat and she opened her mouth to speak, but Kingsley held up a hand. “It would have to be a slow transition, and a space for squib affairs would still have to be maintained in the Ministry because we don’t abandon our citizens. There would have to be a liaison between your centre and this office, and we may eventually subcontract you to maintain our interests in squib welfare. In the meantime, I will speak to Percy about securing funding for more employees so we can at least begin separating S.O.P. from M.O.P. more quickly and ease the burdens within the department.”

Hermione threw herself at Kingsley and hugged him until he wheezed.

“Kingsley, my God, I can’t thank you enough.”

“I trust you, Hermione,” Kingsley said, patting her back. She let him go and beamed a watery smile at him. “And I’m tired of Phaedra bloody Withersby nattering on in my ear about competent employees she refuses to support properly.”

“What has she said? Oh, don’t tell me. Wait! Do tell me.”

Kingsley laughed and shook his head. 

“Never you mind,” he said. “You’re creating a great deal of paperwork for me, you realise?”

“I’ll owe you one,” she said. “I’ll owe you a thousand.”

Kingsley stood and drained the tea from his cup. 

“This will be good,” he said. “You’re outgrowing us. You were always too brilliant to languish away with the likes of us.”

“I would never have been able to achieve anything like this without having worked in the Ministry first.”

Kingsley shook Hermione’s hand again.

“You were meant for greater things,” he said. “Anyone with a brain could see it.”

Hermione’s heart felt full and her eyes prickled. Kingsley’s blinding white smile came out again. He threw some Floo powder into the fire and it blazed green. 

“Oh, Hermione?” Kingsley paused before the fireplace. “Why squibs?” 

“Because a society is only as good as how we treat the most vulnerable among us.” 

Before he disappeared into the fire, Hermione thought he looked proud.

 

Severus took Hermione to see _God’s Own Country_ at the Cameo Picturehouse. There were bigger screens in people’s homes now, and the seats were creaky and cramped, but there was a bar and there was Severus beside her, close enough for Hermione to feel the warmth of his body though he didn’t touch her. Every time she ventured a glance at him she found him transfixed by the film. Two men fell in love against the Yorkshire landscape, and Hermione wondered if he always went to the cinema alone.

“Well, it was very British,” Hermione said as they meandered back towards the Apothecary. 

“Did you not like it?” Severus said.

“I didn’t say that,” Hermione said. “The cinematography was beautiful. And the story was in their eyes, so it didn’t matter if you couldn’t understand a word they were saying.”

Severus laughed, a rusty old thing that seemed to surprise himself as much as Hermione.

“All I could think of was Four Yorkshiremen!” Hermione said.

Severus laughed again, though he tried to hide it behind lips pressed shut. Hermione forced herself to gaze straight ahead. Narrow medieval streets, crooked with cobblestone, wound them past stone cottages nestled into modest gardens. 

“I caught you enjoying yourself once or twice,” he said.

“It had its moments,” Hermione said. “I know my taste in films is plebeian. In my defence, the last time I went with any regularity, _The Little Mermaid_ was playing.”

Severus hummed out an acknowledgement. 

“I missed it,” he said. Hermione glanced up at him. “Before I was shipped off to school, going to the cinema was one luxury my parents indulged me in when they could. To get me out of the house, no doubt.” He shook his head. “It was…something to come back to.”

Hermione knew she was staring, but she wanted to memorise the hard lines of his face as well as the unexpected softness there: the almond chip eyes offsetting high, sharp cheekbones, the lush pink of his lips tender against the cut of his chin, his jaw. She wanted to mush their faces together, not even in a kiss. The urge to consume him felt foreign and strange and exhilarating; beyond sex, beyond desire, she wanted to step into him and know him. She wanted him to know her.

“What,” he snarled, scowling again. A smile touched Hermione’s lips.

“You’re not how I thought you’d be,” she said. 

“You didn’t know me, before,” he grumbled. “That was not—knowing.”

“I can see that now,” she said. She slid her hand down his arm and tangled their fingers together. He managed to look surprised and unhappy all at once. “Should I not?” she asked.

Severus shook his head, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. He squeezed her hand. 

“I had a part to play, and there was enormous pressure on me.”

“I know,” Hermione said. She felt him stiffen against her, even as they kept walking. The brackets around his mouth deepened.

“More than that, Miss Granger, I am not an easy man,” he said. “I am not a _nice_ man. If you value your heart and your dignity, you’ll turn back now.”

Hermione looked at their plodding feet. She leaned into him and held on. They turned the corner and back of The Apothecary came into view.

“My favourite film is _The Princess Bride_ ,” she said. They passed a few buildings before he responded.

“Mine is _Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams_.”

They let go of each other at the door, and a streetlamp cast Severus’s face in shadows and angles, like a cubist painting. He avoided looking at her, but she felt watched nonetheless. He let them into the building and held his hand out for her to go ahead of him up the stairs. 

Inside his flat he turned the light on in the sitting room and slung both their jackets onto a hat tree. 

“Tea?” he said.

“Severus.”

Finally he raised his head to meet her gaze. She stepped up to him and reached up to cup his cheek. He squeezed his eyes shut as if it hurt, but he leaned in nonetheless. Stubble prickled against her palm. Hermione’s heartbeat thundered through her body. He opened his eyes and heat pulsed low into Hermione’s belly.

“You can play me your favourite records and tell me about _Dreams_ ,” she said. “Or you can have me.”

She felt his breath on her lips. Both of his hands came up to cradle the back of her head. His thumbs drew across her cheekbones. He was committing her to memory.

“I’m secretive and reticent,” he said.

“I’ve not found you so,” Hermione said.

“I am unaccustomed to caring for the needs of another person.”

“I’ve been told I’m an overbearing, condescending workaholic.”

“I’ve never been able to make a relationship work.”

“Neither have I,” Hermione said.

“I ruin everything I touch,” Severus said, voice a dark rumble.

“Even bulldozers?” Hermione asked.

“Hermione—”

She rocked up on her toes and pressed her lips to his. His bottom lip was fuller than she expected, and the kiss was soft but sent sparks up her spine. She parted her lips and he followed with a touch of his tongue to hers. She sighed and deepened the kiss, wrapping her arms around his neck. His hands slid down her shoulders to her hips and he hiked her against him. Her breasts ached for attention, but her neck strained from the effort of reaching up to him.

“You’re too tall!” she said.

“You’re too short,” he snarled, and picked her up without ceremony. She squealed but he sucked a kiss into the skin behind her ear and her squeal turned into a moan. Hardly realising they’d moved at all, she found herself deposited into a bed with Severus Snape leaning over her, eyes ablaze. Hermione’s legs fell open around his hips. She wondered if he could feel her searing quim like she could feel the hard knot of his prick through his trousers.

“Tell me to stop,” he said. “Walk out that door.”

Hermione brushed the fringe off his forehead and pushed her fingers into his hair before gripping a handful at the root. His eyelids slid halfway shut and his hips stuttered against her.

“Stop anytime, Severus,” she said. “But not on my account.” She yanked him down and plundered his mouth. He growled into her mouth and shoved a hand under her shirt. He pulled away, chest heaving, to set his nose against the skin he bared there. He heaved air into his lungs as if he could hoard the scent of her, and he nosed yet further, up and up to the swell of her breasts, still trapped in her bra, and then into her armpits. He rose to his knees, splayed on either side of her body, to tear the shirt over her head. Hermione scrambled to sit so she could undo her bra, but Severus had paused, still as a doe in the crosshairs. 

The curse scar almost cleaved her in two. A nick at the junction of her shoulder and neck gave way to a thick, ropy scar that split Hermione’s clavicle, wound around her left breast and across her torso to terminate on the right side of her back, beneath her ribs. It was shiny and raised, so dark it was almost purple against the brown of her skin. It still itched sometimes.

“Don’t,” she said. 

“When,” he said.

“Bellatrix Lestrange caught me at Malfoy Manor,” she said. “Does it matter?”

Severus pushed her shoulder gently until she fell back into the blankets. He bent to smell and then lick where the scar had damaged her breast, where it drew across her diaphragm and her ribs. Hermione let her eyes fall shut and her breath shutter out of her. Her nipples felt so hard they hurt. She pulled impatiently at Severus’s collar.

“Off,” she said. “I want to feel you.”

He sat up and unbuttoned his shirt with the same precision he used to prepare potions ingredients. When the shirt came off he stilled as if awaiting judgement. He was slender and angular, and in addition to the one on his neck and shoulder, thin scars interrupted the hair on his chest and stomach like a roadmap, but the body before her was lashed with wiry muscle and set her heartbeat racing. Even accounting for the silvery scar where his Dark Mark used to be.

She rose again and set her hands on his shoulders. She stroked over the graceful line of his collarbone, the raised knot of his scar tissue and down over his pectorals. The hair there was softer than she might have imagined. She dragged her thumbs over his nipples and his breath caught. She looked up and found him gazing at her as if mesmerised, a flush splashed across his cheekbones, his breath quick.

She dropped her hands to her waistband to wrestle herself out of her jeans. Severus helped her, and when she was naked before him, he got out of his own trousers without taking his eyes off her. His cock was thick and long, head straining from the foreskin and already shining. Hermione’s mouth watered at the sight of it.

“Lie back,” Severus said in a growl.

Hermione complied, her arse and quim heavy with arousal. She was slick already, every heartbeat a hot moment of torture that only engorged her further. She spread her legs, feet planted on the mattress. Severus’s attention raked over her face and her breasts to rest on the slick slit of her quim. She could feel herself dripping. He leaned over her for another kiss, and then ducked his head to suck a nipple into his mouth. Hermione cried out and arched into him, clutching his hair. He laved his tongue over it and bit it with care. Hermione pushed her hips up, but Severus tilted his cock away and nosed down her belly into the springy thicket of hair on her pubis. He dragged the scent of her into his lungs and she moaned, head falling back into the pillows.

Severus pushed his arms under her thighs and held her in place by her hips. He licked down one side of her clitoris and then the other whilst she whimpered. He pressed closer, his incipient beard a flame to her nerves, and set to flicking his tongue over her in a steady rhythm. Hermione moaned and cupped her breasts, pinching and twisting her nipples. Severus growled and hummed through his task, and Hermione could feel him wanking himself below her. Her thighs threatened to close around his ears, and the sound of his slurping grew louder. She squirmed under his mouth and left off one nipple to lay a hand in his hair. She bucked up when he sucked her entire clitoris into his mouth.

“I need—”

“What do you need, Hermione,” he said.

“Your fingers,” she said, breathless. “Please.”

Severus growled and shifted enough to plunge two fingers into her. He hooked them furiously against the anterior wall of her vagina until she shouted. She pushed his head away and surged up, dragging him toward her for a kiss. She moaned at the taste of herself on his face. Severus’s hands came around her arse and he pulled her into him. His cock was hot and velvet-soft against her belly. She gave his narrow arse a squeeze before pushing him back and bending down to get that lovely prick in her mouth. 

Her lips stretched wide and her jaw threatened to creak with the effort, but the head of his cock slid right up against her palate as if made to fit there. Severus grunted and a hand cupped the back of her head. She pulsed her tongue over the slit and reached up to press his hand harder against her head, tangled his fingers into her hair. His groan reverberated between the walls. She let go of his hand and he obliged her with a tight grip at the roots of her hair. She hummed around his cock, saliva dribbling from the corners of her mouth, and set to bobbing and sucking in earnest, rubbing the head with her tongue all the while.

“Fuck that’s good,” Severus gasped. His free hand came down on the cheek of her arse and she wriggled back into it. He tried again, a little harder, and she moaned. He rubbed and stroked over both cheeks as she moaned again.

She pulled off his cock with a gasp, jaw aching, and said, “You should put your fingers in my arse.”

“Fuck,” Severus said, and in her hands his prick grew somehow harder. He scrambled to his bedside table and rummaged around in the drawer. Hermione arranged herself arse-up before him, pillow tucked under her hips. She spread her legs and clenched her arse in anticipation. Her arsehole felt as needy and hungry as her salivating quim. She felt the touch of Severus’s hands on her calves and then her thighs. Her eyes fluttered shut when his mouth landed on her clit again. He lapped up her slick and then his tongue was swirling at her arsehole. Her shout was muffled by bedding, but she rocked into his face and he set to work flickering his tongue over the tight ring of her arse. She buckled onto her shoulders to yank again at her nipples. Soon her arse was slack enough for Severus to sink two fingers into her. He crooked them and massaged the walls of her arse slowly, gently—just the way she needed even if she wanted it harder. She raised her head enough to keen out her appreciation and push back into the contact. 

Severus pulled away and Hermione heard the crinkle of a condom.

“I can use a spell,” she said. He paused. “ _Accio_ wand,” she said, and two wands snapped into her hand. Severus snatched his up and shoved it somewhere as Hermione murmured the necessary spells for protection and contraception. Severus’s prick nudged her quim as he rubbed his hands down her back, lingering at the end of her scar, the dips above her arse. He set the pad of his thumb against her arsehole and pushed his cock inside her quim. Hermione moaned at the sensation of being filled, and Severus sighed along with her. He leaned over her and gathered a breast in one hand, tweaking the nipple until she whimpered. His teeth grazed the base of her neck and sent electricity dancing along her spine. She rocked back into him with increasing desperation.

“Severus,” she gasped.

He stroked over her arsecheeks again before gripping her hips to set a glorious, punishing rhythm. She screamed into the bedding, eyes rolling back. The drag of his prick inside her lit up her G-spot until she could think of nothing but being fucked. When he pulled on her hair, she arched up and laid her head against his shoulder. He craned around to kiss her deeply until she broke away and rolled onto her back, slinging her legs around his hips to draw him in. He pushed her tits together and sucked at both nipples with just enough tooth to have her moaning. He pulled back and steadied his cock at her entrance again, but she stilled him with a touch to his wrist. He looked up. His lips were parted, pink and swollen, eyes dark at half-mast, chest heaving. She marveled at how gorgeous he was like this, a creature of desire and pleasure. Hermione licked her lips and pushed his hand down until the head of his prick rested against her arse. His breath rushed out of him.

“ _Accio_ lube,” she said, and handed him the bottle he’d unearthed from his drawer earlier. She pulled her legs back and held herself open for him by her knees whilst he slathered the lube onto his prick and then gently into her arse. She clenched greedily around his fingers and moaned. He pulled his fingers out and replaced them with the head of his cock, which seemed impossibly huge. He leaned over her, eyes on hers, but she couldn’t keep hers open. She bore down as he pressed inside. The head eased past the first ring of muscle and then, after a moment’s pressure, the second, and then his whole prick was inside her, thick and hot and so good. Hermione shouted out even as Severus groaned as if in great relief. She could feel every millimetre of him in the deepest part of herself, the stretch and fill exquisite.

He began to move slowly, as if only to nudge her, until she tilted her hips up to take him deeper.

“Come on,” she said. “Please.”

He pulled most of the way out and thrust back in with more force, and bellow erupted from Hermione’s throat. He did it again, and again, and again until she was meeting him thrust for thrust and he was fucking her with abandon, the air between them growing humid with sweat and breath and slick. Each thrust was punctuated with a grunt from him and a moan from her. When he dipped his head to suck and scrape at her needy tits, she practically shrieked. 

The tendrils of an orgasm began to tighten around the base of her spine. She pushed her fingers into her pubic hair to rub frantically at her clit. Severus straightened without breaking stride and batted her hand away. With unerring accuracy Hermione supposed she should have anticipated from him, two of his fingertips landed on her clitoris and rubbed firmly back and forth at the same pace she’d set. Her mouth fell open, her eyes fell shut, and she held her breath. Stars bloomed behind her eyelids and her body clenched up around his prick. 

“Yes,” he hissed.

His groan reverberated through her body and her pleasure spiked and tightened until it finally broke and she choked out a single shout. Her body shook with pleasure and her arse spasmed around Severus’s cock. She locked her arms around him as she fell apart and he collapsed onto her, resting his forehead against her temple. With a few more wild thrusts, his prick jerked within her and he grunted. His hips stuttered and then he was still, pulling out of her with a squelch and letting his weight rest half on her body and half on the bed. Hermione stroked her hands down his back and turned her head to kiss whichever parts of his face she could reach, which turned out to be his nose. He indulged her with closed eyes.

They lay there panting in the cooling air. Severus slid off of her and flopped onto his back. Boneless, she let her head fall against his shoulder. He cast about for her hand with his trapped one and entangled their fingers. After several long minutes, semen began to seep out of her, so she groped about for her wand and cast _Evanesco_ over the both of them.

“Convenient, that,” he murmured. She huffed out a laugh.

“I suppose it’s been a while since you’ve been with a witch,” she said.

“A very long while, yes,” he said.

“Long while for me too,” she said. “With anyone, I mean.” She had the sense she should feel mortified by the admission as well as the way she misspoke, but she was too sated to care. Years. It had been years since she’d had sex, and years more still since she’d been satisfied by a partner.

“It was quite…extraordinary,” he said. Hermione pressed her smile into his shoulder.

“It’s usually a bit more awkward at the beginning.”

Severus hummed. Hermione closed her eyes to savour the smell of him. 

“Thanks for indulging me,” she said. “I should have mentioned. What I like.”

“Eh? I thought you did.”

“I mean, before. I should have discussed it with you instead of springing it on you.”

His shoulder bounced under her head.

“I am unfamiliar with the niceties,” he said, “and I would probably stuff them all up anyway. We had rather intoxicating sex that ended explosively for the both of us. Banish that apologetic tone at once.”

Something in her chest slotted into place like a puzzle box. How many lovers had Hermione had who couldn’t give her what she wanted, whether by nature or by lack of desire or even by lack of kindness, and here was fearsome Severus Snape, back from the dead and living like a Muggle, offering it all up for her without a thought? Commanding and firm but gentle when he had to be, observant and precise in touch and pace. And his cock—as impressive in stature as the man himself. 

Hermione turned on her side and Severus lifted up his arm to make room. She laid her arm over his belly.

“Intoxicating?” she said. 

“I said what I said.”

“Guess you’ll have to keep me around.”

“Hmph,” Severus said, but somehow, it only made Hermione laugh.

Night time had rendered everything in Severus’s bedroom some shade of blue. Hermione was drowsy and her mind grew dreamlike and fanciful. His skin was the pale blue moon and her hand a dark lavender mushroom growing on it. Did he remember the moon landing? He was old enough, but had he had a television growing up? Had he been too enamoured of the magic of his mother’s people to become preoccupied with the magic of science?

“Challenger,” she murmured.

“What?”

At the sound of his voice, Hermione’s brain came back awake.

“Do you remember the Challenger?” she asked. “I do.”

“You must have been very young,” he said.

“Six years old,” she said. “We were at school and everyone had turned up in the aud so we could watch it together. A teacher in space. Women in space. It was, I don’t know.”

“A new era,” he said. “Hope.”

Hermione nodded. They turned on their sides to face each other. One of Severus’s hands came to rest on one of Hermione’s breasts.

“Everyone screamed when it happened,” she said. “The projector exploded so we didn’t have to watch anymore, and the fire engines came. I think that was me.”

“Your first accidental magic?” 

“The first I can remember,” she said. “I felt too much, imagining all the astronauts burning up. They must have been so scared.”

“It was probably quick for them,” Severus said. 

“Quick and miserable and terrifying,” Hermione said. “I couldn’t stop crying. The other children learned to give me wide berth. My parents put me into counselling.”

“You’ve been turning your empathy into action your entire life,” Severus said. “And here I thought it was merely an overdeveloped sense of moral superiority wielded with as much grace as a hammer.” The words were softened by the way he lifted his hand to trace her lip with his thumb. Her eyes fell shut. 

“I still feel everything,” Hermione whispered.

“Then I shall endeavour not to be a raw nerve for you,” Severus said. He kissed her and set his nose against her temple. She fell asleep to the steadiness of his breath.


	3. Chapter 3

On Hermione’s last Friday night off, it was Ephigenia’s turn to show up at her doorstep.

“ _Please_ tell me your leave is over soon,” she said, marching straight past Hermione and into her kitchen, where she began rummaging for liquor.

“In the credenza,” Hermione said. “And yes, I’m going back on Monday. What’s happened?”

“Phaedra bloody Withersby,” Ephigenia said, pivoting to kneel before the credenza. She pulled out a bottle of Laphroaig Hermione had barely touched. Hermione set two glasses on the credenza, and Ephigenia popped up to pour three fingers for both of them. “She’s got wind of your plans and she’s on the warpath.”

“Oh dear,” Hermione said. “Kingsley must have started the paperwork.” 

Ephigenia snorted out a laugh and sat at the kitchen table. Hermione sat opposite her and swirled the Scotch around in her glass.

“So today she shows up unannounced and says she needs to speak with the children.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Not alone, obviously,” Ephigenia said. “One of the tutors sat in with them for each interview, you know Varna?”

“Of course, of course.” Hermione waved a hand.

“Well Herself gets through Harry F., Hermione M., Roderick, and Ophelia before Varna begs off for a trip to the loo and comes to get me.”

“What the hell was she doing to them?” Hermione’s mind raced; she had half a letter to the Minister composed before Ephigenia clapped once to bring her back to herself.

“Look alive, Hermione!” she said. “I took care of it, but I’m swear I’m this close to an old-fashioned witch-burning.” She held her thumb and forefinger scant millimetres apart.

“Sorry, what did she want?” Hermione asked. “She didn’t hurt them!”

“No, nothing like that,” Ephigenia said. “Though you know how sensitive Harry F. is.” Ephigenia tipped back a mouthful of Laphroaig. “She was pumping them for information about you. Where you took them, what you talk about on your excursions, if they thought your little trips were worthwhile, all that stuff.”

“Harry’s all right?”

“He’s fine, darling,” Ephigenia said, and she tilted her head sideways to gaze at Hermione with something like admiration. “You do love them, don’t you.”

“Not as much as you do, Ephigenia.” Hermione held her glass out, and Ephigenia tapped it with hers. They each took a sip and let the Scotch burn smoothly down their throats in the quiet.

“I had to escort her out,” Ephigenia said when she was down to a single finger. “She had a wild look in her eye and she was starting to shout. I don’t know what would have happened if St. Hieronymus’ weren’t up to its arse in protective magic.” 

“I’m sorry I left you in her tender clutches,” Hermione said. “I’ll file a complaint with the Minister.”

“Ta, love, but I already have,” Epigenia said. “He’s a good one, your Kingsley.”

“I dread the day he hangs up his hat.”

“You’d do well in his position,” Ephigenia said with a bounce of her brow. “I daresay everyone under a hundred and five would vote for you.

Hermione exaggerated a full-body cringe.

“I wouldn’t want it,” she said. “Too much politicking, pushing and pulling in a million different directions, smiling with a dagger in your hand. I’m too bloody-minded and bald-faced, too eager to remind everyone where I came from. No, I’m content to focus my energies on one thing at a time, and the direction of the entire country isn’t it.”

“Building a centre for squib advancement and all that entails isn’t exactly one thing at a time, darling.”

The Scotch was beginning to warm up her veins. Hermione rested her head in her hand and grinned at her friend.

“Do one thing and do it properly,” she said. “That’s my philosophy. Just so happens, my one thing is making sure squibs are getting the same opportunities afforded to anyone else. To squibardry!” She raised her glass, and Ephigenia clinked it again. 

“You look abnormally relaxed,” Ephigenia said, “and you’re making up words, though I admit it’s a good one. You haven’t had nearly enough drink for such a thing. Hermione Granger, you’ve met a man. Have you slept with him yet?”

“Oh, hush,” Hermione said, but a grin split her face and her cheeks burned. Ephigenia practically vibrated off her chair.

“Is this the man with whom it was definitely ‘not like that?’”

“It’s very much like that,” Hermione said.

“Now that’s something to drink to,” Ephigenia said, and drew another swig. “Tell me everything.”

“Well he’s—” Hermione felt wrong-footed. She couldn’t reveal who he was, and even something minor might give him away. Ephigenia was a squib in her forties; she didn’t live under a rock. She would know the Tragedy of Severus Snape, as the _Prophet_ was wont to call it around every significant anniversary and birthday. “His name is Stephen,” she said. “He’s a chemist.”

“I thought you said he was a wizard,” Ephigenia said. “Don’t you have to have some fancy certs to be a chemist?”

“He did a post-grad for it and everything,” Hermione said. “He was very thoughtful about leaving, very patient. He laid a thorough foundation for his new life.”

“Smart,” Ephigenia said, eyes sparkling away. “Prescient. Canny. He’d have to be, to catch your interest.” 

Hermione grinned and shrugged. Ephigenia laughed and tapped her foot under the table.

“Look at you, infatuated,” she said. “You ought to look like this every day.”

“He’s not what I expected,” Hermione said. “But he challenges me and listens to me and lets me see a side of himself I’m not sure anyone ever has. He makes me think in three dimensions. He doesn’t let me get away with any shite.”

Ephigenia tipped back the last of her Laphroaig. 

“That, my friend, is what Quidditch fans call a keeper.”

“He wasn’t what I expected,” Hermione said again, as if to herself.

“Love never is.” 

Hermione quailed to hear the word. It was too soon. It was too much. It was Severus Snape. 

Oblivious to the existential crisis unfolding before her, Ephigenia stood up and patted Hermione on the shoulder. 

“Thanks for the drink, darling,” she said. “It’s Friday night. Go see your young man.”

 

Severus buzzed her up and let her in with a question in the lift of his brow. He was wearing a white t-shirt and blue sleep pants. His toes were bony. A worn paperback dangled from one long-fingered hand. It was all very distracting.

“Did we have an appointment I’m forgetting?” he asked.

“You’ve never forgotten something in your life,” Hermione said.

“Are you _drunk?_ ”

“I had _one_ drink,” she said. “And I missed you.”

“Ah.” Severus stood aside, and Hermione plopped onto the sofa in the sitting room. It was still warm from his body. “I did think three days was a bit much, myself,” he said, picking a bit of nothing off his shoulder.

Hermione beamed up at him. He sighed and joined her on the sofa. He was stiff beside her, but he stretched his arm out behind her.

“We should devise a means of communicating with each other,” she said. “I can’t always pop ’round, and contrary to what you may think, I don’t actually wish to impose.”

“Post?” Severus asked, and Hermione rolled her eyes.

“I don’t think you want owls hanging about, so we need something that doesn’t take three days.”

“Can you use electronic devices?”

“More and more,” Hermione said. “It’s rather part and parcel to my job, so we’ve had to develop support for computers and mobiles and things, but it’s very limited yet.”

“I have email,” he said, and then sighed. “And a mobile.”

“Ha! I knew it.”

“Texts are for emergencies only,” he said in his best Professor Snape voice, and Hermione stifled a bubble of laughter. “I can’t bear all the tinkling and the buzzing. For what? Smile face. Thumbs up.”

“All right, old man,” Hermione said. “No texts unless the sky is falling.”

He looked at her through sooty lashes and her heart skipped a beat. Carefully, as if he despaired of his welcome, he cupped her cheek and traced the crest of her cheekbone with his thumb. She leaned in, lips parted, and he closed the distance with a kiss. His mouth was soft on hers.

“Scotch,” he murmured when they parted. “From a good year.”

“It was a gift from Harry,” Hermione said. “He thinks I should cut loose more.”

Severus stood and held his hand out. She took it and he pulled her to her feet.

“Saint Potter has spoken,” he said. “I have just the thing.”

He led her to the corner of the sitting room, where countless LPs lined the shelves. 

“Pick some music whilst I set up,” he said. “And no, there’s no bloody Fleetwood Mac.” 

“You’re just put out that _Rumours_ got so popular,” Hermione said. Severus grunted at her, and she snickered.

She made her way through the records, which were meticulously organised by singer or group and then by album title, and pulled out any that struck her as illuminating. This was one more piece of the Severus Snape puzzle, and Hermione was greedy for the whole picture.

Behind her, she could hear Severus moving furniture and arranging things, but Hermione kept flicking through his collection. The first shelf seemed set apart from the rest, the sleeves well-worn and much-handled, a self-contained selection within easy reach. She would lay odds that these were his favourite records, and thus the options she would choose from. When she was done she had in hand David Bowie’s _The Man Who Sold the World_ , Brian Eno’s _Here Come the Warm Jets_ , Joy Division’s _Unknown Pleasures_ , New Order’s _Power, Corruption, & Lies,_ Lou Reed’s _Transformer_ , Iggy and the Stooges’ _Raw Power_ , filed under ’S,’ and U2’s _The Unforgettable Fire_. They were all artists she had heard of but albums she had missed.

When she turned around to hand them to him, she discovered Severus had built a nest in the middle of his sitting room. There were swathes of blankets on cushions and several pillows strewn around the edges. He held his hands out and she set the stack of records into them. He glanced at each one and grunted when he reached the last.

“An eclectic mix to be sure,” he said. “But I think there’s a narrative there.” He nodded toward the nest. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Hermione stood about awkwardly for a moment, watching the lines of his back move underneath the thin cotton of his t-shirt. She’d never seen his biceps or his forearms or his collarbone before the other night, and the entire fact of him seemed softened by the sleep clothes in a way his Muggle uniform of woollen trousers and pressed button-down couldn’t achieve. She could even see the cheeky curve of his arse through the pyjama bottoms. Her heart ached; her tits ached. He moved away from the record player to adjust the lights, and on impulse Hermione took off all her clothes and slipped under some blankets. 

The lights were dim when the first strains of electric guitar came on, and he turned around and froze. She looked at him with raised brows.

“I couldn’t possibly get cosy in your nest with jeans and a jumper on.”

“Quite,” he said faintly. 

She patted the space next to her.

“Come on, Severus,” she said. “Tell me all about this album.”

Severus shucked his clothes and tucked himself in beside her. They didn’t touch, and he gazed up at the ceiling.

“ _The Man Who Sold the World_ came out in 1970,” he said. “Bowie was…becoming the Bowie we would know, but he was not yet the force he would come to be. At this point he still struck everyone as rather queer, especially in the industrial north, where I come from.”

“My God,” Hermione said. “You understood every word from that film the other night.”

He ventured a glance at her and smiled enough that she could see the way one tooth twisted into a little snaggle before he pinned his attention back on the ceiling.

“Yes,” he said. “But a provincial accent is the sort of thing one learns to keep under wraps in a certain serpent’s den.”

Hermione frowned and searched for something to say, but Severus spoke again before she found the right words.

“I discovered Bowie in 1974, two years after Ziggy Stardust,” he said. “I was fourteen, and it was like being split open and seen for the first time. There was something about him. Bisexual in a dress, wearing lipstick and glitter trousers, a beautiful woman on each arm and a man to shock everyone with on stage, an alien singing about landing on Earth. I was nothing like him but it was as if he had known me, and named me, and reached out his hand. He was a Muggle but I swear he was magic.”

Hermione set her fingertips on his arm. He turned his palm up, and she set her hand in his.

“I couldn’t really afford records back then,” he said. “My mam might scrape together enough to get me one on the odd birthday or Christmas, but most in my collection—which was sparse, mind—were stolen. I’d heard it, but I didn’t get this one until I moved here.”

Hermione didn’t know what she expected to hear when she asked about the albums. Something pedantic about the history of the music or how many albums had sold, rock star drama. But every artist, every album, sometimes every song came with a story of whom Severus had been at the time. 

They wound through the music in chronological order. 

Of _Transformer_ , he said, “1972. This was produced by Bowie, who had become popular by then and was a great fan of the Velvet Underground. I was searching for anything Bowie was remotely connected to. Lou Reed was American and shocking in a different way—no characters, no artifice, just the starkness of vice with no apology. Sex and drugs, male and female, they were all a single entity here, and he was somehow ecstatic and bored at the same time. It was the essential soundtrack to a hedonism I couldn’t access. At fourteen or fifteen, I was so titillated I didn’t know what to do with myself, wanking myself into oblivion on nothing but the suggestion of fishnet tights and then feeling awful about it. I wanted so badly not to care what anyone else thought, just like Bowie and Lou and Iggy. But my life seemed buffeted about by the opinions and judgements of others, and the only time I could be entirely suspended from all the horrors of my life were when I could be alone in my room and put these albums on.”

Of _Raw Power_ , “1973, another Bowie production. Deceptive, at first, because _raw_ is such an apt word for it. Nothing was polished, the Stooges could barely play their instruments, Iggy was spastic on the vocals. They were a live band and hardly passable at that; being in the studio flummoxed them. But when ‘Gimme Danger’ came on, it was as if the world rearranged itself. Suddenly the Stooges were the greatest garage band that ever made it big, spitting truths, directing the very future of rock and roll. The song was its own drug, throwing you first into the depths of despair and then into the heights of desire, obsession, connection. It didn’t matter when the notes were sour or the reverb scraped your eardrums—you wanted to feel it, whatever it was. Love, I suppose. Need. And I felt it.” 

Of _Here Come the Warm Jets,_ “1974. A bit—schizophrenic. By turns polished and dirty, gleeful and sinister, sometimes it felt as though it hardly hung together at all, but other times you’d listen and what it was trying to say through the nonsense seemed undeniable: that people are corrupt and beauty and pleasure are the only things worth reaching for. Being an unbearable little shite around fifteen, sixteen, I was sure I was the only one who understood it. ‘It’ being the album, ‘it’ being the world. Jaded and worldly having never been anywhere but school, what a cliché.”

When they got to _Unknown Pleasures_ , Severus paused at the record player. His shoulders tensed even when he lay back down, and when he began to speak it was halting and rough. 

“1979,” he said, and cleared his throat. “My entrance back into music. I was marked by then, and I thought the clean fire of it had burned away the Muggle in me, like the Dark Lord promised. I was a half-blood and everyone knew it, but we all pretended, _I_ pretended it wasn’t so. As if one’s blood, one’s heritage, were a game. As if blood had anything to do with magic. We were children playing make-believe whilst the man himself yanked us about like marionettes. 

“I’d boxed away my records back at Spinner’s End, but I hadn’t the heart to get rid of them. One day, I was out running some errand for Himself in Muggle London because I was the only one who could do it without bollixing it up, and I passed a record store. Sex Pistols posters in the windows, the Ramones, the Cure, Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees. All music I’d missed whilst I was—away. I don’t know why I went in, but it was like a compulsion. They were playing ‘Transmission’ on the sound system and I was suddenly back in my body, though I never knew I’d left it. All bass and buzz. Dance to the radio, Ian Curtis said to me. No language, just sound, he said. I bought the single, and this album, and I went back to my empty house and dug out my record player and put it on and…”

Severus fell abruptly silent, mouth curving violently downward. He was holding Hermione’s hand too tightly. She kissed his knuckles and he let her go.

“You put it on and…”

“It was like Bowie all over again,” he said, eyes closed. “I was laid bare before myself, but instead of showing me what life could be without the constraints of a meaningless old world order, Joy Division showed me as I was in that moment. Nineteen years old with blood on my hands. A deviant, neither Muggle nor a proper wizard, without control of the darkness consuming me because I was my own darkness. Who could understand such a thing? Not my friends. Not my enemies. Not my _master_. But some Muggle having fits on stage—he understood what I was. I understood what he was.” 

Notes that sounded like they’d been produced by laser cascaded around them. Hermione laid her hand over his heart and sighed into his shoulder. 

“Don’t romanticise this version of me,” Severus said. “This was not the end of my being a Death Eater. I was perfectly capable of hating myself and all Muggles indiscriminately and never examining that hatred in connection to what I was doing for the Dark Lord or what I loved so much in the music. But I began to steal away from my duties to return to my smokestack town and ramshackle house, and I would listen. I would listen and I would feel something real.”

It was out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Why did you join them, Severus?”

He stood abruptly and strode to the record player, where he stopped the album and set in the next one with too much force. Hermione winced. He came back and pulled the blankets all the way up to his chin like a cocoon. He kept his hands to himself and trained his eyes on the ceiling. A strong bass line led a synth-heavy melody into the room.

“ _Power, Corruption, & Lies,_” he said. “1983. Lily was dead. So was Ian Curtis. New Order rose up from the ashes of Joy Division and began to develop a whole new sound that would come to define the decade. This was their second album. This—Edinburgh, the Apothecary, my wand locked away. It’s my—” He swallowed. “—second go.”

“I know,” Hermione whispered. He licked his dry lips.

“There are the obvious reasons,” he said. “The ones I told myself when I finally knelt before the Dark Lord for my _reward_.” He sneered. “My drunken, wife-beating Muggle father pissing away whatever pittance he got from the dole whilst our stomachs growled, Potter and Black stringing me up for everyone to see and then sending me into the jaws of a werewolf with nary a slap on the wrist, Lily turning away from me, my professors never taking me or my work seriously because I was poor and in the wrong house and liked the wrong things and had the wrong face. That I would be respected when the real wizards came into power. That I would be strong and powerful and witches and wizards alike would look at me with fear and awe. That Muggles were beneath us, and Muggleborns had stolen our magic, and half-bloods were the weak, pathetic results of wizards who went slumming. That I was poor and friendless and motherless and could somehow change my fate.”

He looked at her then, eyes black in the low light. His mouth was set and his brow lined. Hermione’s heart couldn’t decide if it wanted to speed up or stop altogether.

“They were all excuses,” he said. “A revenge fantasy layered into all the travails of my life. It’s easy to become a true believer in whatever cultist philosophy comes your way when you have no sense of self and no one in your corner. You’re drowning and someone hands you a lifeline and tells you what to do or say to become like him and you do it because you’re so bloody starved for any scrap of acceptance you don’t notice he’s a viper until it’s too late to keep your soul clean. 

“On this side of things, I can see my past self for what he was: an angry young man who thought himself powerless, who thought if he could exercise what power he had over the people who had hurt him, it would make him respectable. A lonely young man whose only friend had abandoned him, and rightfully so. A uncomfortable young man taught from birth to hate himself. An arrogant gobshite who thought he was too smart to be played. Once Malfoy saw me, once Voldemort got me in his sights…” Severus shook his head, mouth twisting. “I never stood a chance.” 

Hermione wanted to tell him none of them would have lived without him, that they’d needed someone on the inside to win the war, that not only his leaving the Death Eaters but his joining them had carved the hard path to victory, but she knew it was cold comfort. There were some things no amount of atonement can make right. She shuffled up to him and gently pulled the blanket away from his chin. She threw an arm across his chest and laid her cheek on his arm.

“I love you,” she said, and all the air rushed out of him. 

“Hermione…”

“You don’t have to say it back,” she said. “I just wanted you to know.”

Severus put his arm around her. They lay there letting the sounds of the synthesizer fill their ears.

They never got to _The Unforgettable Fire_.

 

Hermione returned to work on Monday to a shower of flowers, confetti, and fairy cakes, and when that was all over, she found Percy Weasley waiting in her office to speak with her. She didn’t see him very often, and was always struck by how the years seemed hell-bent on rendering him into the mirror of his father. With none of the charm.

“Oh dear,” Hermione said. “I wish I’d known you were here; I wouldn’t have dawdled.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Celebrations and such are important for morale. I came in early enough today that taking a break here was a welcome diversion.”

Hermione suppressed a sigh and took her usual seat at her desk, opposite him.

“How can I help you, Percy?”

“I merely wished to debrief you on two situations we find ourselves in,” he said. He produced two letters from his robes and set them on her desk. “Phaedra Withersby was found guilty of inappropriate conduct and thus was let go from her position, which means her role as the head of the Department of Social Welfare is open. I am prepared to offer you this position today.”

Hermione’s eyebrows threatened to jump off her face.

“Oh!”

“You may have time to consider the offer, of course,” Percy said. “It represents a significant increase in responsibility and pay.”

“Are you trying to get me to abandon my plans for the future of S.O.P.?” Hermione asked. “Is _Kingsley?_ ”

Percy’s mouth thinned and he pushed his glasses up his nose.

“Hardly, Hermione,” he said. “Madam Withersby’s exit was abrupt, and you’re the best candidate for her position in this department. We know you have a different vision, but as long as we’re restructuring MOP’n’SOP to have a bit more breathing room and overseeing a long transition to privatisation, we thought you might like a new challenge.”

“Sorry, Percy,” she said. “You know how I get.”

That mouth thinned yet further.

“I don’t think I can do it,” Hermione said. “I’ve made a commitment to Squib Outreach and I have to see it through. I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” Percy said. “We knew that would be your likeliest response.”

“Thank you,” Hermione said. “I _am_ honoured to be asked. What was the second thing?”

Percy arranged himself so his legs were crossed and his hands were laced together over his knee.

“Purity First, you’ve heard of them?” he said. Hermione nodded, frowning. “Their protest of the Wizengamot Inclusion Act has escalated to personal threats against the Minister’s family. Their security has been tightened.”

“That’s awful,” Hermione said. “But not exactly within the scope of my office.”

“Hermione,” Percy said. He leaned forward. His eyes were the same blue as Ron’s. “Consider this personal, if you like. I’d hate to see something happen to you.”

Disquiet overtook her.

“Are you saying there’s a threat against me?”

“No, not at all,” he said, and sighed. “I am not a fool, Hermione. I’ve not forgotten our history— _my_ history. Constant vigilance. When blood purist groups like this, no matter how marginal, begin threatening people, it’s only a matter of time before they target more vulnerable populations, both literally and symbolically. There’s no Muggleborn witch or wizard more high-profile than you, Hermione. And there’s no one who does more for Muggleborns and squibs than you, either.”

“Do you think I need protection detail?” she asked.

Percy stood up and fussed with his robe.

“Protection detail isn’t afforded us without credible threats,” he said as he strode to the door. He paused there and leaned into the jamb, face haggard. “This is not a credible threat; this is one overcautious Ministry cog who couldn’t bear to lose someone to all this madness again.” 

Tears pricked at Hermione’s eyes. Fred’s slack face, splattered in blood, came back to her unbidden. With it came the image of Percy clutching at him, disbelieving and so young, casting about wildly for someone able to fix what went wrong.

“Thanks, Perce,” she said. “I’ll be careful.”

He favoured her with a tremulous smile before he swept out of her office.

 

Hermione arrived home from dinner with Severus to find Harry lounging on her sofa, leafing through a book Severus had given her. It told the story of a Glaswegian radio host whose life is interrupted by a man who claims he is Cyrano de Bergerac. She hadn’t finished yet, but she was riveted.

“I didn’t even know you read Muggle fiction,” he said.

“It was a gift,” she said. “I’m getting back into it. I used to love to read stories, you know. It’s funny how much we’re asked to abandon for this world.”

“Wizardkind is curiously devoid of good writers,” Harry said, and then his face split into a grin. “Who was the gift from?”

“Harry, honestly!”

“You’re seeing someone, I knew it.”

“How could you possibly know that,” she said.

Harry began ticking the reasons off on his fingers as Hermione slid out of her shoes.

“One: you pop in less often which is terrible, by the way; two: when you do pop in you seem cheerier and less prone to moaning about your job; three: the last time I saw you, you were wearing lipstick; and four: it’s half ten on a weeknight and you’ve been gone for _hours_.” He held up four fingers triumphantly.

“How the Aurory ever let you get away, I’ll never know,” Hermione said and plopped onto the sofa next to him. Harry stuck his tongue out at her, but the effect was entirely ruined by his incessant grinning and barely contained buzzing. “What are you so happy about, Master Healer?”

“I got a letter from Luna,” he said. “We’re going to try again.”

Hermione froze.

“Oh, Harry, that’s wonderful,” she said.

Harry’s smile slid off his face.

“What’s that about?” he said. “Hermione?”

Hermione blew a hank of hair off her forehead. She took a deep breath, laid a hand on Harry’s knee, and looked him in the eye. 

“You know I love Luna, and I love you and Luna together, and all I want is for both of you to be happy.”

“Hermione. I’m a big boy. Get on with it.”

“She’s a rover, Harry, in the most literal sense,” Hermione said. “She lives to explore every pocket of the world and rustle the bushes for snorkacks or what have you.”

“She does more than that, she—”

“I know, Harry,” Hermione said. “She’s a conservationist and a tamer of beasts and the person you love most in the world. But she’s not someone who can be happy staying in one place for the rest of her days. You’re putting down roots and she’s flexing her wings.”

Luna’s letter, folded into an origami crane, materialised in Harry’s hand.

“Look,” he said, holding it out to her. “She’s coming home. She wants to try.”

“Are you going to travel with her?” Hermione asked, gently pushing his hand away. The letter was gone with a blink. Wandless, wordless. That’s why Harry had left for so long. Why he’d had to go. All that power and no way to harness it. Now here he was ten years after coming home and using it like a parlour trick without a thought.

“Of course I will, when I can,” he said. “But you know how Healing works, Hermione. You put your head down and pay your dues for the first several years. And that’s not even counting the time it will take for my paeds certification. I can’t take too much holiday at first.”

“What are you going to do when she gets restless again?”

“We’re going to discuss it!” He dragged his hands through it hair; it stuck up at all angles. “Why do you do this?”

“You asked for my opinion, Harry.”

“But why do you always think you’re the only one who’s an adult?” he said. “And why do you refuse to believe the two of us are capable of compromise and hashing out our needs?”

“Because you’ve never been able to before!” Hermione said, voice raised. With a wave of Harry’s hand, a sound dampening spell settled around them. “This is what, the third break up?” Her shouting was reduced to a distant squeaking.

“You’re hardly an expert in relationships, Hermione,” Harry said as if from very far away. “First you drive Ron into Malfoy’s arms—”

Hermione gaped at him and a muffled squeal escaped her throat.

“—and then you go through a series of blokes who clearly can’t keep up with that dirty great brain of yours and you drive them away by being so patronising because you never really wanted them in the first place!”

“Malfoy is not my fault!”

“How are you going to stuff this one up, I wonder!”

“How dare you!”

“How dare _you!_ ”

“You came to me, Harry! _You_ came to _me!_ ”

“You sound ridiculous!”

“Whose fault is that!”

They sat there glaring at each other until they dissolved into a fit of giggles and the spell melted away.

“Sorry,” Harry said when he came up for air.

“Me too,” Hermione said. 

“I know Luna and I have got a lot to work through,” he said. “I know that. But I have to believe there’s a way we can negotiate being together. Being without her is—” He shook his head. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“Oh, Harry,” Hermione said. She threw her arm around his shoulders and he tried on a smile, but it came out wrong and he couldn’t meet her eyes. “I know it’s hard. I do want it to work for you, truly.”

“Do you ever go full Hermione on _her?_ ” he asked. 

“ _Full Hermione?_ ”

“You know what I mean,” Harry said. “Do you ever come at her with ‘have you tried staying home once in a while?’”

“That’s between Luna and me,” Hermione said. Then she pitched her voice low and added, “But yes.” 

Harry laughed and pulled her in for a tight hug. When he let her go, he pushed the hair from her forehead and tapped her chin.

“Lipstick,” he said. “Worn away. Don’t think I can’t tell.”

“Oh, blast.”

“Fess up, Hermione.”

It was a dangerous thing, she knew, to be telling Harry about Severus. Then again, if the two of them meant for what was blossoming between them to work long-term, he couldn’t actually believe she would keep her best friend from knowing anything about him. Maybe he’d even consent to telling Harry he was still alive. And rejoining the wizarding world. And taking a position at the future centre for squib affairs.

“His name is Stephen Savage,” she said. “He’s a chemist in Edinburgh, and we’ve been seeing a lot of each other the last month or so.”

“Intelligent?” Harry asked. 

Hermione nodded. 

“Keeps your interest?” 

Hermione nodded.

“Treats you right?” 

Hermione nodded vigorously and beamed. Harry exhaled, and he returned her smile with one of his own.

“Then I hope he deserves you,” he said. 

 

Hermione woke to sunlight tracking its way across Severus’s bedroom. He lay beside her, still asleep. He didn’t often allow himself a lie-in; he worked the shop alone and kept a rigid schedule. But it was Sunday, the Apothecary was closed, and he had earned his rest by giving Hermione two vigorous tumbles the night before. 

He was lovely like this, sprawled out on his stomach with the sun trickling in to lend the white expanse of his back a golden glow. The comforter had bunched up around his hips, revealing the curve of his arse and the shadowed divot between the cheeks. His biceps, his shoulder blades, even the shine of his scar and the jut of his hip bones inflamed her. Hermione held back the urge to run her hand down his back and over his arse.

She rolled out of bed nimbly and repaired to the bathroom. When she was finished she pulled on a dressing gown of his—black of course, but silky and sumptuous—and sat at the window overlooking the street. She held one curtain open enough to peer outside and found the sun shining, the skies clear, the birds chirping. Faintly she heard the sound of someone playing the bagpipes. A woman wearing only leggings and a jumper inched down the pavement following the elderly dog she had on leash.

A series of pops and grunts turned her attention back to Severus, who was cracking his spine like a line of knuckles. He rolled onto his side and squinted at her, frowning into the light.

“You look like a naiad lounging on the lake shore,” he said. Hermione let the curtain fall back into place. The oversized dressing gown slipped off one shoulder to reveal her breast. Hermione could feel the way it drew his gaze down her body. “Come back to bed,” he said.

“I was thinking of a picnic on Arthur’s Seat,” she said. “It’s a lovely day out.”

Severus yawned and stretched. Hermione was struck by the vulnerability of it. Back in school she had never seen him make any movement outside of his iron control; now here he lay, languid before her, resplendent in nudity, doing something as mundane and bodily as yawning.

“You’ve never been up Arthur’s Seat,” he said.

“Which is a great reason to go today, and have some breakfast while we’re at it,” she said. 

A crooked, sly smile stole across his face.

“It’s windy,” he said. “Extremely windy. Even on a ‘lovely day.’”

“And this is incompatible with a picnic?”

“You might find your bap splattered all over the hill, or your porridge decorating your jacket.” He smirked. “It’s more powerful than you think it will be.”

“You make that face as if I’m ridiculous for not anticipating a stiff breeze but all I hear is the story of you losing something important at the top.”

He huffed out a laugh and sat up with another sinuous stretch.

“It was a book,” he said, “and my scarf kept slapping me in the face.”

Hermione grinned and slid off the windowsill. Severus watched her avidly as she let the dressing gown pool on the floor and climbed back into bed, only to clamber into his lap and bracket his hips with her knees. She savoured the way he looked up at her in awe. Her arms came up around his neck.

“Breakfast here then,” she said, nudging his nose with hers. “And then we’re getting up that hill.”

They kissed, and when she pulled away, he smoothed her hair down. Sleep had sent it puffing upward in wild sprigs.

“Do you have something strong with which to secure all this glory?”

Hermione snorted, and leaned in for another kiss, and another. Severus’s hand trailed down to cup her breast and then tweak the nipple. She was throbbing in no time, and an answering hardness budged up against her from below. She maneuvered him inside her and rocked against him as he suckled her nipple and roved his hands over her back. As the morning light crept across the bed, she ground her clitoris into his pubis and forced his prick deeper inside her. She fucked him with increasing forcefulness until he hooked a finger in her arse and she came, back arched and gasping. She sagged into Severus’s embrace but only locked him tighter in her arms. With a grunt he came inside her and they tumbled back into the bedding, sated and panting. 

Arthur’s Seat was neither difficult nor long, as hikes go, but they did have to pass Salisbury Crags and a piper to get there. Hermione didn’t mind the sound of bagpipes—in fact she rather liked them—but it seemed almost comical to her to be trudging up a proud Scottish mountain whilst someone played proud Scottish music, thistles and nettles and gorse everywhere. It was as if the entire experience wanted to remind her she was in Scotland. 

“Maybe Nessie will pop up as we’re coming down,” she said, shouting over the wind. Severus and his long strides upward were making the whole thing look much more elegant than she felt, bustling up through the burn in her thighs. 

“Nonsense,” Severus said. “We’re nowhere near a decent loch.” 

“Oh, we should go to Inverness,” Hermione said. “There’s a castle.”

“How castles haven’t lost their novelty to you, I’ll never know.”

“We could take a couple days, see the city and the loch and the castle. It would be lovely.”

“I do have customers occasionally, Hermione,” Severus said. 

“Just a weekend,” she said. “One extra day off, signalled weeks in advance.”

“Hmph.”

At the top, Hermione forgot all about Loch Ness. Edinburgh was sprawled out before them like a postcard: the maze of medieval streets beyond the proud crest of Salisbury Crags, Edinburgh Castle lit up on its throne of volcanic rock, Scott Monument rising high above the skyline, the Firth of Forth glittering to the east. The wind was mighty, but the view was enough to make her forget that, too. 

Almost. Severus was wearing a navy knit cap, secured in place by the same spell locking down Hermione’s hair, but black locks had escaped from underneath and whipped about his forehead and his eyes. He looked perfectly ridiculous and dear. He’d cut a dramatic figure against the blue sky and the city down below if he weren’t being blinded by his own hair. Hermione wanted to snap a photo on her mobile but she was sure that would be met with outrage.

“What was the book?” she asked. “The one that went tumbling down the seat?”

“First it was the pages torn from the binding,” he said with a rueful twist of his lips, “and then the book wholesale. It was _Waverley_ , because I thought I should go fully native, or something such.” One shoulder rose and dropped delicately. “Turns out it’s just as ‘Edinburgh’ to go sit in the warm at Cafe Noir with a Rebus novel in hand, watching through the window as two homeless argue over a pint they keep passing very carefully back and forth between them. ”

Hermione laughed. She took a seat and after a moment’s consideration, Severus sat beside her. She linked their arms and leaned into him for warmth. He also made a good human shield against the wind.

“Where else will you take me, so I can see your Edinburgh?” she asked.

“Well, there are the dungeons,” he said, watching her from the corner of his eye.

“Of course,” she said.

“The Haymarket and the National Gallery and Roslyn Abbey and even the Cowgate if you want to watch the students vomit.”

“Unmissable,” she said. His mouth was curving steadily into a real smile.

“The rest of my favourite restaurants,” he said. “Every dusty book shop. A play. The Princes Street Gardens to take your picnic. Craigmillar Castle to get your fix. The Fringe, if you—” 

“If I…”

“If you’re better than me at tolerating crowds,” he said. And then, quietly, “If you’re still here in August.”

She laid her head on his shoulder. Percy’s concern for her safety rose to the forefront of her mind. She almost asked him what he thought of it: Purity First, the threats against Kingsley’s family, the relative danger of her position as the most prominent Muggleborn in the social consciousness of all of British wizardry. But he was smiling, his face turned up into the wind as it lashed colour into his cheeks, far above his chosen home where he’d found and forged a peace she didn’t dare disturb.

“What,” he said.

“Hm?”

“You said ‘what do you think’ and then shut up. What do I think of what?”

“Oh.” 

An eloquent brow arched in question.

“Erm.” She cast about for something to say. “What do you think of telling Harry you’re alive?” she blurted, and then winced. _God, that was so much worse_. Severus’s eyes went wide and he reared back.

“What?” he said. “Why?”

It was out there. She couldn’t take it back. _Might as well lean in,_ she thought.

“Because he’s my best friend,” she said. “Because you’re rapidly becoming the biggest part of my life outside of work and I hate to lie to him.”

“It is out of the question,” he said in his fiercest Professor Snape voice.

“You trusted him with your memories once,” she said. “You trusted him to finish it. Why can’t you trust him with this?”

Severus stood quickly enough that Hermione had to dart a hand out to brace herself against the ground. In the space of a breath he was disappearing down the Seat.

“Hey!” She followed as quickly as her legs would allow. “You don’t get to leave me at the top of a bloody mountain just to avoid a conversation!”

“When you sink your teeth into a notion, Miss Granger, you do not _converse_.” The back of him was all she could see, but she heard the sneer loud and clear. “You blast through like a gigantic red and gold wrecking ball. I’ll not stand by politely only to be knocked down by your fanatical belief that you know what’s best for everyone and damn what they want.”

“ _Stand by politely!_ ” Hermione heard herself screeching but couldn’t stop. “That’s rich coming from you!”

“Please tell me more from your moral high ground, I’m so eager to hear it ringing in my ears for the rest of time!”

“Being _English_ outs, you know! You can’t run from it forever! It’s all around you, even now!”

He whipped around and she stopped short, panting. The wind set what hair had escaped his cap flying upwards, but it made his scowl no less fearsome. He was the great scourge of Hogwarts once again, and something forever young and small inside her quailed at the sight of him.

“Goodbye, Miss Granger,” he said. “I trust you can find your way to Holyrood Park.”

Hermione’s heart dropped and her legs locked up. He left her there on Arthur’s Seat, the wind wailing, the bagpipes droning on, and she was helpless but to watch him stride away.


	4. Chapter 4

When Hermione tumbled through Harry’s fireplace, it was Luna she found on the sofa, sketchbook in hand. At the woosh of the flames, she looked up from her work and brightened. When she set aside the sketchbook, Hermione’s jaw dropped at the sight of her belly, which appeared to be swollen to the tune of seven months gone. As long as she’d been away.

“Hello, Hermione,” she said. “It’s so good to see you, even if you’re sad.”

“Luna! What!”

Luna, who always seemed to be floating along in a way that highlighted how graceless everyone else was, struggled to her feet. Hermione was by her side in an instant, and when they hugged around the beach ball Luna had swallowed, Hermione was mortified to find herself bursting into tears. 

She was dimly aware of Luna rubbing her back and murmuring comforting nonsense in her ear. She didn’t know how long they stood there, but by the time she came back to herself, her head was pounding and her eyes felt like they were on fire. A ripple tickled across her belly.

“Oh!” Hermione pulled away. “Oh, it’s moving!”

“She does that a lot lately,” Luna said with a smile. “You can touch if you want.” 

Hermione laid a hand on Luna’s belly, where the ripple blossomed into a full wave. It was as amazing as it was alien, and though she’d felt it countless times before in the wombs of various Weasley women, Hermione knew with a sudden certainty that she’d never bear children. 

“She?” she said. Luna’s smile widened and she nodded.

“We’re thinking about names now,” she said. 

“Harry didn’t tell me,” Hermione said, and the tears threatened to overtake her again.

“I only just got home last night,” Luna said. “We were up all night talking, and of course we had to fit in loads of sex, and then he went to St. Mungo’s this morning. I’m sure he’s bursting to tell you and Ron as soon as he has a free moment.”

A watery laugh bubbled out of Hermione, and she stepped back to wipe uselessly at her face. 

“God, look at me, blubbering all over you,” she said. “You should sit. Do you want me to make you some tea? Chamomile? Peppermint?”

Luna sat dutifully, but tugged on Hermione’s hand until she slid in beside her. Her eyes were big and luminous and blue. Meeting them always felt a bit like being set adrift on some great, still sea.

“I’m quite well, Hermione,” she said. “It’s all right if you’re not.”

Hermione’s face crumpled and she turned away again. A rush of fresh tears renewed the stinging of her eyes.

“I just feel so _stupid,_ ” she cried. “To have thought it could last, to have thought it could end any other way, to be crying over a man in the first place!”

“I see,” Luna said. “It’s your first time.”

“What?” Hermione said, her breath hitching. “My first time with what?”

“Heartbreak,” Luna said. “Real love.”

“I’m thirty-eight years old!” Hermione wailed.

“My father didn’t fall properly in love until he met my mother when he was seventy-three,” Luna said. She set her hand on Hermione’s knee. “Love comes to us on its own schedule. Do you want to tell me about him?”

Hermione sat up straight and closed her eyes. She held her breath in an attempt to control its wild hitching and swiped at her eyes again.

“He was full of passion,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it, but he was. For his city, for the people he served, for music and books and the bloody cinema.” She gasped for breath again. “For _me._ ”

“He sounds lovely,” Luna said. “He gave you something you were missing.”

Hermione nodded and the tears came again.

“What happened?” Luna asked.

“He’s a bloody-minded, stubborn arse who refuses to understand that sometimes you have to unclench enough to let someone else into your life!”

“Ah. That’s disappointing.”

“And…” Hermione’s breath came out stuttering again.

“And?”

“And I pushed, like I always do!” Hermione balled her hands into fists and she thumped her own thighs. Silently Luna covered one of Hermione’s hands with her own and stroked gently over her locked fingers. Hermione shuddered and she forced her hands to relax. She sagged against Luna’s side, which proved a more solid buttress than usual. “Usually I’m pushing away,” Hermione said, “but this time I wanted so much so badly. I pushed and pushed until he cracked. I can’t even blame him.”

It must have been nonsensical, but Luna hummed with agreement nonetheless. Hermione sobbed a little bit more, trying to keep it quiet, whilst Luna sat silently, running her thumb over Hermione’s knuckles.

After the crying tapered off and Hermione blew her nose, she asked Luna about her pregnancy.

“I was in Peru studying the mating habits of the Western Bramstiggle when I found out,” Luna said. “I was already five months gone; I know I should have realised earlier, but in my defence, my cycle has never been what one might call ‘predictable,’ and of course Bramstiggle dung can often give wizards and witches dizzy spells. It was easy to miss.”

“But you didn’t tell Harry until last night?” Hermione asked, and _God_ but there it was: the snide, judgemental edge to her question. She felt the urge to break up with herself, too.

For her part, Luna answered as peaceably as ever.

“I loved him too much to put it so baldly on a bit of parchment. ‘Wish you were here, by the way you’re to become a father.’ It wouldn’t have been right. Since Apparition was out, I had to leave the village I was staying in by Muggle means, so it took me some weeks of traveling by van and bus to get to Lima, where there’s a wizarding community. I stayed there for a few more weeks to see a Healer, and take all the necessary potions, and make sure everything was all right. I sent Harry a letter telling him I wanted to see him, and that I loved him. I told him I wanted to try again. I know that was selfish, but…” She shrugged.

“It’s not,” Hermione said. “Maybe for some people it would be, but… Harry never let go of you, Luna. He always hoped you would come back to him. He—he always will, when you go.”

Luna pressed on the curve of her belly. 

“Did you know there are Wickerspin colonies off the coast of Scotland, and that the Scabby Ungerwalls of Wales are endangered?” she asked.

Hermione frowned. 

“No?” she said.

“Yes,” Luna said. “There’s a lot of work to be done right here in the United Kingdom. And Ireland.”

“Ah.” Hermione smiled at her and was horrified when she began to cry again. Luna arm came up around Hermione’s shoulders.

“I know it’s not the same, but you have us,” Luna said. “Me and Harry and Ron and the baby. And the Weasleys, and Ms. Hillcut, and all the children. Even Draco. You are so loved, Hermione.”

Hermione only sobbed harder. Harry took that moment to step out from the fire.

“Oi!” He rushed to her side. “What’s happened! Are the squibs all right?”

“It’s her young man, Harry,” Luna said over Hermione’s head. “They’ve broken up.”

“Ah.” Harry budged in next to her so she was squashed between him and Luna. “Well, he’s clearly a wanker of the first order,” he said. “Do you want me to put a little curse on him, Hermione? Pestilent boils, maybe, or a permalimp spell? Just say the word.”

Hermione laughed and sniffled. She met his eyes and found them full of joy.

“I’m happy for you, Harry,” she said and a huge grin stole over his face. 

“Thanks,” he said. “I was going to find you as soon as I got out of my hospital robes.”

“A little girl!”

“Only a handful of weeks left,” he said. “I wondered if you wouldn’t mind if we named her Hermione.”

Hermione started crying again. She could feel the way Harry and Luna were communing over her head, probably in a series of complicated facial expressions couples of long standing tend to develop over the years of their union. Suddenly a steaming mug of tea appeared on the coffee table before her.

“We don’t _have_ to name her Hermione…”

“You shouldn’t,” Hermione said when she came up for air. “Not that I’m not honoured, and grateful, and full of love. But there are thousands of them out there. You can’t throw a cat in the street for hitting a Hermione. She’ll be one of thirteen in her graduating class.” She took his hand and squeezed it. “Her name should be Lily,” she said. She turned to Luna. “Or Pandora.” A smile touched Luna’s lips. “Or something all her own, because she’ll be all her own. Thank you for thinking of me, and I can’t wait to meet her, but no.”

Harry bent to kiss her on the forehead. The tears threatened again, so she slid out from between the two of them and made her way to the fireplace.

“Thanks for the tea, but I think I’ll go home to have a bath and a wallow,” she said. “Congratulations again.”

“If you need anything…” Harry said.

“I know.” She threw Floo powder into the fire.

“Watch out for the scheming muldroons,” Luna called out as she stepped into the fire. “They’re lurking everywhere.”

 

 _Dear Severus,_ Hermione wrote, and vanished it.

_Dear Stephen,_

_I hope this missive finds you well. I write only to tell you how sorry I am for trying to force you into something you didn’t agree to. I should have been able to accept you as you were, since I had certainly been able to love you as you were. It is the curse of the idealist, I think, to view everything in the light of what the idealist perceives as its potential instead of as it is. That doesn’t make much sense, but I hope you understand me, because you seem to have a knack for doing so, which is something that I’ve found quite lacking in my life. You’re a Scot now. I admired that about you right from the start, and I shouldn’t have been so callous as to believe casual visits to England wouldn’t be fraught for you._

_I want to tell you that I cherish our time together, even now. I did not know I could feel that way, nor that being with someone the way we were could be so nourishing. It’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it? To be my age and only just now finding out about love. Though our time was brief, I can’t help but feel I know you better than anyone ever has, and you know me the same way. Being known is intoxicating, isn’t it?_

_I’ve listened to the Unforgettable Fire. It’s quite different from the rest, but it makes me feel hopeful, somehow. Maybe that’s what it does for you, too._

_I miss you. I do. I want you to respond by saying, **Come to me post-haste and forget all of this.** I know my chances of such a thing are slim to none, but I wasn’t sorted into the house of lions for nothing._

_Even if you can’t do that, I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive me, Stephen. Forgive a foolish Englishwoman with a broken heart._

_Yours with love,_

_Hermione_

She stamped the envelope with the return address that would reach her even through Muggle post, and then threw the whole thing promptly into the bin.

It went through countless iterations and she hemmed and hawed over it for weeks before she finally stuck it in a post box. 

Weeks more went by, and she didn’t hear back.

 

With the expansion of S.O.P. and M.O.P. came the freedom to do more engaging trips with the children of St. Hieronymus’ Home for Wayward Squibs than, say, a visit to a chemist’s shop. Thus, Hermione, Ephigenia, and a handful of tutors chaperoned all twenty-six of the children over ten on what would be, for most of them, their first Muggle train ride and overnight stay. They were all very excited and chattering away, but Hermione and the rest of the adults made sure each one knew how the train station worked, how the automated ticketing machines as well as the queues worked, where the platforms were and how to find where they were going, who to ask if they were lost and how to listen for announcements. They were also meant to hold on to their own tickets to present the ticket collector when asked. It was going to be a fun trip, but there was no part of it that wasn’t a learning experience.

They went to Birmingham, tickets in hand for Cadbury World. Hermione had even got enough funding to pay for the older students to have a “chocolatier experience,” which was all any of them could talk about at dinner afterward. The younger students were put out that they’d missed it until they were assured this trip would be a yearly one. Harry L., Hermione F., and Ophelia were suddenly keen to become chocolatiers, and Varna had pulled out her mobile phone to Google “how to become a chocolatier.” Several of the children had gathered round her to see the answer.

Hermione was watching with fondness when a tap came at her foot. She looked at Ephigenia across the table from her, whose eyebrows were doing some heavy lifting.

“How are you holding up, love?” she asked.

Hermione flapped a hand. 

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“You’re a shite liar, Hermione Granger.”

Hermione sighed. She poked at the bowl of don buri before her.

“He took me to this chocolate shop,” she said. “Posh place, best chocolate I’ve ever had. I was exhausted, it was restorative, he hadn’t even had to ask if I’d needed it. And he bloody sat there looking as good as one of the hand-painted truffles. I wasn’t sure before, but I knew then that I was going to…” She forced herself to smile, but the workings of Ephigenia’s eyebrows told her she didn’t believe her for a second. She sank in on herself and shrugged. “Cadbury World was rather a hoot but it couldn’t compare.”

“We didn’t have to go to an actual emotional minefield, my girl.”

“Well we could hardly afford Disneyland Paris!”

“Lor, but can you imagine?” Ephigenia sniggered. “Us showing up with a fleet of children who didn’t know who any of the characters were.”

“Maybe we could afford to put a telly and DVD collection in the rec room now,” Hermione said. “Maybe in a few years, we really could go to Disneyland Paris.”

“I want to be quite judicious about that sort of thing,” Ephigenia said.

“Oh?”

“You know, limit their screen time. They need fluency in mobiles and computers, but they mustn’t become enslaved to them.”

“You could think of a background in popular films as a form of cultural fluency, but I do see what you mean,” Hermione said.

“It’s not a bad idea though,” Ephigenia said. “We could do something like have the telly but no cable—”

“Who could afford it?”

“—and do Sunday afternoon film screenings instead. And I could keep the DVDs in my office to be signed out on certain days.”

Hermione’s brain was firing a thousand ideas at her, and she sat up straighter to give her mouth better access to her thoughts, but suddenly Ephigenia’s face pinched into a scowl and tension squeezed her in on herself. The hair at the back of Hermione’s neck stood up and quivered.

“Madam Withersby,” Ephigenia said, cold and flat. Hermione stiffened and turned around to look up at her former boss. It was magenta ruffles today.

“Miss Hillcut,” she said. “Miss Granger. How curious to find you at a Wagamama in Birmingham with all your little charges. Surrounded by Muggles.”

Hermione pushed insistently at Ephigenia’s foot. Genius that she was, Ephigenia stood quickly and rushed to the cluster of would-be-chocolatiers to hiss, “ _get out now_.” The rest of the tutors sprang into action and ushered the children from the restaurant as Ephigenia darted up to the counter, no doubt to have the proprietor evacuate the rest of the customers. Hermione felt the press of her wand in her sleeve.

She stood to face Phaedra Withersby, whose hair was wild and lopsided and whose lipstick had smeared across her cheek. An alarm sounded and Muggles grumbled all around them as they filed out. 

“You look a fright, Phaedra,” Hermione said.

“And you look as mudblooded as ever, I’m afraid.”

“My God, spare me that old song and dance and let’s duel.”

“‘ _My God,_ ’” Withersby snivelled, drawing her wand without finesse. “The Muggle in you does out, doesn’t it.”

Hermione had her wand in hand and half an _Expelliarmus_ out when Withersby kicked her legs out from under her and wrestled her to the ground, knocking away her wand. The back of Hermione’s head smacked into the floor with a sickening crunch. Withersby pinned her there with one knee on her throat and the other on her wand arm. Hermione gasped for air as stars cascaded behind her eyes, her free arm flailing about. Gardenia perfume boggled her senses.

“It’s funny,” Withersby said in that grating sing-song voice of hers. “That your blood can be pure shit and still none of you ever expect an old-fashioned Muggle brawl.”

“—won’t—be—good—f’you,” Hermione choked out.

Withersby cackled like the proverbial witch in a Muggle fairy story. She placed the tip of her wand at Hermione’s temple.

“I’ve nothing to lose, have I?” she said. “Job’s gone. Son’s dead. If they throw me in Azkaban, at least I’ll have the comfort of having sent one of the people who stole his magic to whatever Hell mudbloods rot in.”

The knee on Hermione’s throat grew heavier. Through the stars she saw Ephigenia creep up behind Withersby, Hermione’s wand clutched in hand. Blackness threatened at the edge of her vision. Ephigenia looked like an avenging angel when she stomped on Withersby’s shoulder. Withersby screamed and whipped around to blast Ephigenia unconscious into the wall, but not before Ephigenia tossed Hermione’s wand to her. Not before Hermione dragged a breath like daggers in through her swollen throat and remembered sunlight on Severus Snape’s face long enough to croak, “ _Expecto Patronum!_ ”

A wisp of blue smoke sparked into an otter that bounced around her frantically.

“Get Ron,” she rasped, “and then Harry.”

Another blow came against her head, and another, and another. The last thing she saw before consciousness left her was the flash of Ron’s Head Auror robes and Harry’s face looming wide-eyed before her.

 

Harry pushed the hair from Hermione’s forehead as she slept on in her hospital bed. It had been thirty hours since the attack and she hadn’t woken. Diagnostic spells indicated swelling in the brain. The Healers had been able to repair her crushed nose, zygomatic arch and oesophagus as well as the crack in her skull, but only time and potions could ease the swelling. 

Harry pulled up a chair and sat at the edge of her bed. He clasped his hands together on the bed rail and laid his forehead down on the resultant knot of fingers. _Please let her wake up_ , he thought, though despite all his travels he still did not know where such thoughts went when they were hurled out with so much desperation into the universe. _I can’t do this without her._

He could hear Ron’s footsteps as he approached. When he appeared beside him, he was in civilian clothes and looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

“Withersby’s in custody and singing like a snidget,” he said. “Changed back to her maiden name so no one would connect her to some Death Eater grunt. Stirred up the idiots in Purity First from behind the scenes just to throw us off the scent. All the pamphlets and picketing the Wizengamot vote and threats against the Shacklebolts were red herrings for her real target.”

“Hermione?” Harry asked. “But why?”

“Don’t be naive,” Ron said, sighing. “You know why.”

“Fucking Hippogriff shit,” Harry said.

“Looks like she even maneuvered her way up the Ministry ladder just to keep Hermione overworked.”

“The ultimate results of which were that the squibs and Muggleborns were kept from accessing all the resources they were entitled to.” Harry knotted his hands together until his knuckles cracked.

Ron pulled up a chair beside him and nudged a cup of tea against his hands. Harry took it without conscious thought.

“You need to go home to Luna, mate,” Ron said. “She’s about to pop and it seems like you might too.”

“She said the baby’s going to be fashionably late.”

“She can’t know that.”

“She knows a lot,” Harry said.

“I can keep vigil, Harry,” he said. “If anything changes, you’ll be the first to know. Well, after the Healer on duty.”

“Draco’ll want you home too,” Harry said.

“He’s locked away in his workshop at all hours the last few weeks,” Ron said, arranging his long legs to fit beside the bed somehow. “He’s taken some notion about thestral feather cores in his new line of wands.”

Harry hummed. “Luna might be interested in that.”

“I think they’re Firecalling about it all the time lately, actually.”

Harry hummed again. Hermione’s face had taken on the slack quality of someone with nothing left inside to animate them. His heart took up residence in his throat.

“We’re not the only people with someone, Ron,” he said.

“Eh?”

“She was seeing this bloke in Edinburgh,” he said. “I’d never seen her like that before. Radiantly happy. Relaxed.”

“Oh, the Muggle chemist?” Ron said. “I thought they broke up.”

“And if you’d broken up with Draco, but weeks later he lay in hospital half dead, wouldn’t you want to see him?” 

Ron grunted and took the untouched tea from Harry’s hand. He blew on it and gulped half of it down in one go.

“We’d have to figure out the intronet to find him,” Ron said. He nodded at Hermione. “Our resident expert in all things Muggle is indisposed.”

“I’ll do it,” Harry said, and stood abruptly. Ron’s hand darted out to grab his wrist. 

“Don’t hurt yourself, mate,” he said. 

Harry shrugged him off. 

“I can handle myself, Ron,” he said. “Look after her.”

In a blink he was in Hermione’s flat. He rifled through the papers on her desk, her kitchen table, her bedside table, searching for any clue as to which chemist’s shop in Edinburgh might employ a Stephen Savage. He found a record, though he knew she had no record player— _The Unforgettable Fire_ , it was called. 

When he’d been through what seemed like every paper in her flat to no avail, he yanked at his hair and bellowed. Then, he closed his eyes. He focused on the way his breath felt, expanding inside him cool and cleansing. He let it out slowly. He could feel the way his magic wrapped around the core of him and pulsed like a heartbeat.

His eyes snapped open.

“Find me Stephen Savage, chemist, Edinburgh,” he said. 

Before him materialised a set of coordinates, a street name, and the words, “The Apothecary.”

 

One of the good things about running a sleepy neighbourhood chemist’s was that it afforded Severus the time to read. He had an Oxfam recliner in the break room and a stack of books beside it. The bell at the door alerted him to the rare customer, and he could get on with it in the peace and quiet. If something inside him was on high alert waiting to hear a certain voice yammer on about the rights of the marginalised or the dubious charms of Stevie Nicks, he certainly wouldn’t admit it.

Still, when the bell tinkled, he sprang to his feet and chucked Jeanette Winterson into the chair without ceremony. It was probably just Mr. Kudriti or that Biverton urchin, but he smoothed down his collar and made sure his shirt was tucked crisply into his trousers. 

“Hello?” a male voice called out, and Severus suppressed his disappointment as he swept out into the shop from behind the rows of medications. A short man with broad shoulders stood before the counter, black hair licking upwards in all directions, and when he turned to meet Severus’s eyes they both screamed.

“Potter!”

“What the fuck!”

“Get out of my shop at once!”

“What are you _doing_ here!”

“What are _you_ doing here!”

“You’re alive!”

“That’s obvious, you Neanderthal!”

“You’ve been dating Hermione!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“What did she say? Is it all over the papers? Why have you come?”

A ripple of magic reverberated out of Potter and Severus heard the locks of the shop doors slide into place. Even the open sign flipped over to read “closed.” A spark of disquiet came to life in Severus’s mind. He wished he had his wand; he knew he couldn’t take Potter even if he’d had it. Some hateful old urge to throw himself at the feet of the most powerful man in Britain rose up, and Severus stamped it down.

“You were supposed to be some Muggle she was seeing!” Potter said, jabbing a finger at him over the counter. 

“And _she_ was supposed to keep my whereabouts a secret!” Severus drew up tall and straight and looked down his nose at one Saviour of the Wizarding World. “For the last time, what do you _want,_ Potter?”

Potter’s cheeks were suffused with red and his chest was heaving; he truly hadn’t expected to see Severus there. Which meant he was searching for Stephen Savage, and probably didn’t mean to kill some hapless Muggle, whether he’d done injury to his friend’s heart or not. Severus watched Potter control his breathing, clenching and unclenching his hands at his sides until he was calm enough to speak.

“It’s Hermione,” he said, and Severus’s heart dropped into his stomach. His nerves lit up and without warning, he was shaking. “She was attacked by a blood supremacist. We don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

“Death Eaters?” 

“Just the mum of one,” Potter said. “Some grunt with little magic who died in a scuffle during the war.”

“Who,” Severus said. 

Potter’s mouth thinned. Despite his colouring, despite his awful hair—he looked like Lily in that moment. Lily disappointed in him. Lily turning her back. He was sixteen years older than Lily ever got to be. 

“She’s in MLE custody, Snape,” he said. “You can’t do anything to her.” Then his face split into a savage grin, and he looked like no one so much as himself. “No matter how much we might want you to.”

Severus looked away.

“What would you have told some Muggle, had you found him here?” he asked. 

“That she was in hospital. That he should come.”

“The Statute of Secrecy—”

“Fuck the statute,” Potter said. “She loved you. If you were a Muggle, if you loved her too, who gives a toss about the statute?”

“That’s easy for the Boy Who Lived to Break the Rules to say,” Severus said, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“Come see her, Snape,” he said. “If you ever cared about her at all, you’ll come before it’s too late.”

Severus imagined it: the buzz of magic, the weight of wizards’ judgement, the spit flying towards him in the street. Hermione lying pale and diminished in a hospital bed.

“I can’t,” Severus said, horrified to hear his voice crack.

Potter sneered and struck the counter with one fist.

“Then you really are a coward,” he said, and vanished.

Severus sagged against the partition. His mind raced in countless directions: whose mother had struck down his strong, wild-haired girl? What was Potter going to do now that he knew Severus was alive and how did he bypass all his anti-Apparition wards? Would wizards ever learn that blood, that _people_ didn’t come in fractions? How many times was he going to be made to remember the worst thing he’d ever done?

He scrambled through the break room and up the stairs into his flat. He threw open his closet door and dropped to his knees to rummage in a box on the floor. In it he found a set of teaching robes, a tiny cauldron in solid gold, a book of potions by Kilpatrick Montague, the premiere potioneer of the 18th century and the father of modern potions, some photographs, both Muggle and magical, and a vial of something that would make his suffering end irrevocably. Underneath it all was his wand.

Before Hermione had summoned it into her hand without a thought the first time they had lain together, he’d not seen it in almost fifteen years. He’d put it back gingerly and closed the door, but it was like closing the door on an elephant. Now that elephant was heavy in his hands. Heavy and familiar and lighting something up inside him he’d thought he could crush. His lip twisted; how like him, to believe his will were somehow stronger than the very force of magic. The truth was, he had always been a fool.

“ _Lumos_ ,” he whispered, and the light seemed to rush up from within him to illuminate the closet. He held his breath to calm his thundering heart. The light fell on the photographs and he sifted through them dispassionately.

A portrait of his mother from her Hogwarts days, looking hard-eyed and sour, as if she knew what fate had in store for her, 1953. A stiff black and white Muggle formal with his unsmiling mother and father at his baptism, 1960. A Polaroid of himself and Lily pulling faces in her family home, 1969. Lily eating Fortescue’s and sticking her tongue out at him over and over in a loop, 1973. Malfoy major and Black minor, smirking in their beautiful, superior way, 1978. 

“ _Incendio,_ ” he said, and the last one went up in flames. He put it out with a wave of his wand. He wished he had photos of Hermione. There had been ample opportunity, and he was like everyone else out there with a smartphone in his pocket. It had been cowardice, just like Potter said. He’d known the affair couldn’t last; his happiness had always been so fleeting as to be half-imagined. He hadn’t wanted the reminders. He hadn’t wanted to be able to look back and see what he was missing.

Her amber-lit eyes. The constellation of freckles across her cheeks, her nose. Her one crooked tooth, the dentists’ daughter. 

The way she listened to him. The way she debated with him on the merits of this or that film, album, book, play. The way she spoke so enthusiastically her hands flung out and her voice rose. The way she saw suffering and sought to ease it. The way she saw _him_ , all of him, and didn’t flinch away. 

His feet knew the way to Holyrood Park. 

 

Hermione woke to pain and her hand cradled in Ephigenia’s. Ephigenia lit up around the bruising on her face, but Hermione began to cry. Ephigenia squeezed her hand before she hopped to her feet, calling out for help, and then a swarm of Healers came in. The pain subsided, and so did Hermione.

The next time she woke, it was Ron at her bedside. He grinned at her and clasped her hand. His eyes filled with tears and his nose flared with the effort of keeping them in.

“’Bout time you woke up,” he said. “We wondered if you’d get here in time.” 

“Time for what,” she said and froze, vision dappling. Someone had set her throat on fire. 

Ron directed his wand to her mouth and said, “ _Aguamenti._ ”

When she finished drinking, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and raised her eyebrows to ask the question her voice wasn’t up to. Ron wiped his eyes and beamed.

“Luna’s having the baby upstairs right now,” he said. “She wanted to do it at home but it looks like she’s breech. Harry got her in the right hands and now he’s up there holding hers.”

The tears rushed out of her even as she smiled. Ron patted her hand.

“Won’t be long now,” he said. 

Hermione groped for her wand. She thought hard until the word “Ephigenia” appeared from the tip like a brand.

“She’s doing great,” Ron said. “And all the children and the tutors got out unharmed, though they’re shaken up, as you can imagine. The Muggles were Obliviated. Harry treated the both of you at the scene. Ephigenia had a crack to the head just like you but it was an easy fix. Bruise salve doesn’t seem to do much for her so she looks a bit, erm, _alarming_ right now, but she’s fine.”

Hermione sank into the bedding, her eyes falling shut. 

“You and her saved everyone in that restaurant,” Ron said. “If you ask me, Kingsley should give you another Order of Merlin.”

Hermione tapped her wand again.

 _You,_ it wrote. 

“And Harry,” Ron said. “The dream team.”

Hermione’s smile was tremulous, but she squeezed Ron’s hand. 

The next time she woke, Severus sat beside her, his face a thunderclap. Her heart began to race.

“Severus,” she murmured. It didn’t hurt as much anymore, but her voice was muffled and broken, and it felt as though there were a manticore sitting on her larynx. 

“Hush,” he said. “Your throat is still healing. You need to give it time. Believe me.”

Hermione cast about for her wand. Severus plucked it from the bedside table and handed it to her.

 _What?_ came up and dissipated like smoke. Severus sighed.

“It was brought to my attention that I was behaving like a massive knob,” he said. “Your boy wonder came to collect a Muggle to visit you but found me instead.”

Hermione gazed at him openly as if to drink him in, an oasis in the desert. His hair had grown beyond his ears, and to her surprise and delight the ends curled upward ever so subtly. 

“You sent me a letter and asked me to forgive you,” Severus said. “I was boorish enough never to respond, because if there’s one thing I’ve never been able to let go of, it’s my pride. Now I find myself prostrated before you, hoping for your forgiveness.”

Hermione shook her head. What was there to forgive? That he wanted his privacy, that he wanted to live in the Muggle world on his own terms? Those were not choices that demanded forgiveness. More, she didn’t want him to come to her now out of misplaced guilt and the fear that she might not survive. She was hale. She was here. She was never going to be anything but what she was: a bulldozer of a Muggleborn witch who lived with one foot in either world.

And just like he always did, he understood her wordless rumination.

“Yes, the attack brought me here,” he said. “Of course I was worried for you, but more than that, I realised what a colossal mistake I’d made. I thought being a Muggle meant being free, but with you gone I understood that I was still hiding, that I had spent the last nineteen years waiting to be caught like a fugitive. I had become my own gaoler. When I walked away from you, I walked away from the only person in more than forty years never to ask me to choose between the disparate threads of my heritage. The only person who behaved as if those threads weren’t disparate at all.”

He pulled his wand from his sleeve and laid it carefully beside Hermione’s own. 

“I Apparated here,” he said. “I greeted your slack-jawed Head Auror in the hall and fended off a Potter brandishing a baby at me. I’m here, if you’ll still have me.” 

Hermione reached her hand out, and he took it. Her heart felt hot and huge. He crooked up one corner of his mouth, and her life slotted back into place.

“I brought a book,” he said. “Would you like me to read to you?”

Hermione nodded. He pulled his hand away with some reluctance and produced a book she’d been meaning to read for decades.

“ _The Remains of the Day,_ ” he read. “By Kazuo Ishiguro.” With elegant fingers he flipped the pages. He cleared his throat. “‘Prologue. July 1956. Darlington Hall. It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.’”

She let his voice lull her to sleep.

 

Hermione thought she’d never get her fill of the sight of Severus Snape holding the rainbow rope.

He was not effusive with the children. He didn’t gush or put on a show of excitement around them, the way many adults did. He didn’t suffer fools, and he had no patience for silliness. He did, however, listen to them intently, and look them in the eye, and think about what they said as if their words had as much import as those of an adult. The children of St. Hieronymus’ had learned that they could come to him with their schoolwork, their troubles, their little hurts. He was better with them than Hermione could ever have dared to hope. She had stopped comparing him to the man who had taught her as a child—that man had died in the dirt and filth of the Shrieking Shack, loveless and alone and so relieved to have reached the end. 

He still ran The Apothecary, but he’d hired help and now split his time between the shop and the Centre for the Advancement of the Admirers of Mrs. Norris, as he persisted in calling it. He had convinced her to lease a facility just outside Edinburgh, a short train ride to North Berwick. She’d moved from her drab London flat into a house they shared in Morningside. There was a Floo in this house, and if he pretended to grumble about Harry and Ron and little Aurelia showing up in their sitting room, Hermione grumbled back about his constant hosting of one Draco Malfoy. Hermione was amused to find he never grumbled about Luna.

It was a Sunday, which meant they were going to see a film. The sun peeked out from behind a cloud enough to cast harsh light across the planes and angles of Severus’s face, which made him look as if he’d been sprung from stone until he nodded thoughtfully at something Harry M. was saying. He looked up as if he could feel her scrutiny from the end of the queue of children between them. He caught her eye and his expression warmed. 

“Onward, chaps,” he said as he led them to the Cameo.

Hermione trailed behind them, all the loves of her life.

 

**End**

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. St. Hieronymus is the patron saint of orphans and adoption, so why not squibs too? 
> 
> 2\. No, Plaisir du Chocolat no longer exists, but it had the world's finest hot chocolate and its absence is a loss to the world, so in this universe, it never left us.
> 
> 3\. God's Own Country is on Netflix, at least in the US at the time of posting. It's lovely, and you should see it.
> 
> 4\. The book Severus gives Hermione is So I Am Glad by A.L. Kennedy. It's a moving, beautiful story, and so is The Remains of the Day.
> 
> 5\. Christian Picciolini, former Neo-Nazi, discusses his descent into and extraction from the US white supremacist movement in [this TED talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/christian_picciolini_my_descent_into_america_s_neo_nazi_movement_and_how_i_got_out?language=en). It's hugely worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch it, and it informed a lot of how I built Snape's backstory.
> 
>  
> 
> With thanks to sweetestdrain, cheerleader and beta extraordinaire, and sisabet, jouissant, and cellar_door too for having to listen to me yammer on about it. <3


End file.
